In the late 1990s three teachers put their heads together to come up with new additional education solutions. This resulted in the establishment of a company called Humap Oy, which currently employs 17 people, has offices in Jyväskylä and Helsinki, and generates a turnover of more than one million euro.
Olli-Pekka Juoperi, Managing Director of Humap, crystallises the company's key idea: "We help organisations with the challenges of learning, collaboration and management both face-to-face and online."
Eleven of the company's 17 employees work as coaches for customer organisations. In practice, coaching covers a wide range of challenges related to the functionality of a work community it may mean strategic planning support or better communications.
Juoperi notes that times have changed. Today, organisations understand the significance of social equity. Fifteen years ago the general mindset was that corporate management defines the strategy and implements it throughout the organisation, but this no longer applies. The current philosophy appreciates that it is impossible to implement a strategy without interaction between the management and the personnel.
Making use of creative thinking, Humap combines perspectives that have traditionally been seen as opposite. Examples of such concept pairs are humanity vs. technology and well-being at work vs. profitable business.
"Expanding collaboration to an information network creates new prerequisites for operational quality. The best way to achieve strategic and business goals is to develop the work community. When the management cares for the personnel, the personnel will care for the company," Juoperi sums up.
Humap's software team develops tools to support the company's core work.
"We have developed such networking tools as the Humap Tool and Macromedian Breeze. Humap Tool enables collaboration online and can be used, for example, in regular appraisal discussions, planning and information collecting. The 'Breeze' is a presence tool with which you can arrange even major events on a virtual basis," says Ilkka Mäkitalo, Director in charge of product and web-based collaboration development at Humap.
Mäkitalo notes that meetings and e-mail correspondence create an extra burden for today's experts, leaving less time for the actual tasks and leading to overtime work.
"We introduce new methods of working and tools to cut unnecessary meetings and change the nature of the necessary ones. Humap Tool helps in this: when work is done online, the number of e-mail messages decreases drastically, and the transparency of work creates a new point of departure for meetings," Mäkitalo says.
Photo: Humap's Coach Eeva-Liisa Vihinen and Managing Director Olli-Pekka Juoperi know the importance of functional communication in a work community.
By Timo Sillanpää Photos by Petteri Kivimäki