New ways of working are also experimented in large companies !
Espoo - Finland
Yesterday, I met Ville Lestinen (to the left on the picture) working at Fortum, an energy supplier in Nordic and Baltic countries, Russia, Poland and India counting around 8 000 employees. My meeting was in Fortum's headquarter in Espoo, the 2nd biggest city of Finland situated at the border of the capital.
I arrived in a business area with high grey buildings as we can see in many other cities in the world. In the entrance, I took my visitor badge and went in the waiting room with informations about the company... Just as in most of the companie's buildings in the world. Ville asks himself why we still go in such places to work when we could work from anywhere for the same job (except for categories of work such as technicians in energy plants of course...). On one hand, there are people in need of a roof in cities and in other hand these huge empty buildings...
Fortum is organized in a conventional hierarchical way. But Ville is organizing a workshop next week to start to implement some new ideas. To go from top-down managed teams to self managed teams, imitating the agility of software companies, would avoid the current waste of time caused by the burden of bureaucracy and it would increase motivation, he believes. This workshop will be an open event : everyone can come, regardless of whether they are Fortum's employees or not.
Ville has started to think about these new ways of working after some experiences as a project manager that showed him how bureaucracy and hierarchy can be inefficient. He commented about some projects in Finland like the well-known fiasco of Olkiluoto nuclear plant in the west of Finland where the construction of a reactor has accumulated a delay of 10 years, or the metro line from Espoo to Helsinki's center still waiting to be open.
The Control and Command way of working is not anymore suitable to today's world with long chains of suppliers and increasing complexity. Instead of planning long term projects, there are ways to let employees use their will to make the project advance and their creativity. These are Sense and Respond ways.
I am looking forward to see how work organization will evolve in the future at Fortum.
