In the face of challenges, Innofactor continues to recruit and expand its services
Innofactor helps its customers succeed by modernising and digitalising their organisations. Their starting point is to put people first in everything they do. Innofactor employs over 500 motivated top professionals in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. According to CEO Sami Ensio, Innofactor has been able to develop new operating practices during the coronavirus pandemic and plans to continue using them, too.
How is your company doing at the moment? What are you working on?
Innofactor is doing well. We are working as usual despite the exceptional situation. Perhaps even a bit more energetically than usual. The only thing that has changed is the work environment, as all of us started working from home a couple of weeks ago. We are holding more Microsoft Teams meetings than ever. Our remote meeting practices have improved even further.
We continue to deliver customer projects, try to sell more and recruit new talents as well. We offer extended support hours from 7 to 19 to our remote system management customers because they need to be able to schedule their remote workdays flexibly. As we also want to facilitate the remote work of companies that are not used to it, we have launched new products to meet this ongoing need.
Has your company worked together with any of the operators in the Business Espoo network? How have you benefited from it?
We have struck up recruitment cooperation with Espoo Employment Services. We were planning to organise an IT sector recruitment event in early April but obviously had to postpone it due to the coronavirus situation. We are now thinking about new digital ways to find talented professionals. We are eagerly looking forward to recruiting new people this way.
What is the most important lesson or insight that you have had because of the coronavirus pandemic?
As rough as it is, the coronavirus epidemic pushes society as a whole to take a huge digital leap. The productivity of Finnish society will rise to a completely new level after the crisis if we take advantage of this situation. We, both businesses and public administration, must not go back to our old ways. When the crisis is over, we all need to take some time to think about the things that improved during these times and find a way to hold on to these best practices from this point forward. I believe that the determined promotion of digitalisation and a modern digital organisation is the key to achieving this.
What does your company hope to gain from Business Espoo’s services?
In this situation, companies need help from society. The need for and the nature of aid greatly depends on the company’s sector and situation. This may mean lower rents, help with the recruitment of new professionals and the reallocation of existing talents. Or it may mean that a public operator continues to buy from a company without interruption. Business Espoo’s task is to help local companies. We hope that Business Espoo will promote companies’ best interests across the Corporate Group of Espoo and enable businesses and entrepreneurs to continue operating as normally as possible in the current situation.
How has the situation affected your company’s operations?
All our personnel have been working remotely since 12 March. We have been able to carry out almost all tasks from home without compromising business continuity. We separately agree with each customer on how work will be carried out. We have adjusted our service portfolio to better match the ongoing situation and we for example offer Remote Work Accelerator Packs and extended service hours from 7 to 19.
In this situation, an organisation must react to the ever-changing situations significantly faster than before. Decisions that used to take a month now must be made in a week. Tasks that used to take a week now must be accomplished in a day. And tasks that used to take a day now must be done in an hour. This poses unforeseen challenges from the management perspective. We also need to take account of the differences between countries. While Finland was shutting down the Uusimaa region with the help of the Finnish Defence Forces, restaurants in Stockholm were launching the terrace season.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our excellent staff. We have quickly found new, flexible ways to integrate work with helping our school-age kids study remotely and taking care of our younger children. A huge thank you to everyone. Now, if ever, is the time to take care of each other.
Have you developed new practices during the coronavirus situation that you plan to continue using?
The coronavirus epidemic has made remote work more efficient across our organisation, including those who were not used to working from home. Remote workers have for example started to use video significantly more. Our teams have virtual morning coffee breaks that have been hugely popular. I believe that in the future we will have more remote meetings and travel less, which will also have positive environmental effects.
Our organisation has also become considerably faster and more agile than before. This is definitely something that we want to maintain as part of our activities.
In the midst of the crisis, we have also been able to develop further our software products and services that support remote work. They now serve the needs of our customers in a modern digital organisation even better than before. These services are guaranteed to help our customers even after the crisis.
Read more about Innofactor on its website(external link, opens in a new window).
