Helsinki-based EEX Oy (Entrepreneurship Exchange) is a growth company whose mission is to make the world more entrepreneurial. EEX provides large corporate transformers with the experience to learn directly from ambitious startup entrepreneurs: How does an entrepreneur make tough decisions? How will they take over new markets and opportunities for sustainable development? Similarly, a manager gets to offer his or her own expertise to help the entrepreneur. In the EEX Journey program one works for one year with their own Advisory Board, which blends the expertise of different industries and companies in a colorful way.
New things are created through collaboration
For us, ‘Collaborate for Growth’ is at the heart of everything we do and with that in mind we also started playing. We believe that new things and growth are created through collaboration. It is of paramount importance to us that everyone in the organization knows each other, knows each other’s strengths and roles, and knows how to take advantage of this. A small and fast-growing team must have a strong level of trust so that everyone can participate fully and openly in the common goal.
The simulation takes you out of work context
Our team is right now at the point where everyone has taken on a new role. A great moment for a simulation! The simulation took us off the work context and made us plain humans: for a moment there were no co-workers but travel partners at Oktoberfest. Playfulness and the gamified nature helped, and we reached a mentally relaxed level where we were able to work with intuition without a work role.
Overall, the simulation was an invigorating experience got us very much involved and provided ideas that we still continue to reflect on and work on. How do we take risks as a team? On what grounds do we make decisions? Both are hugely important things for our scalability, and for them we got good, even strategic, insights from the discussions that arose in the simulation. It’s hard to imagine how else we would have gotten the same insights in such a short amount of time.
The team has a strong attitude for development
The simulation also revealed that the whole team has a really strong attitude for development! It was great to see how we all want to constantly develop what we do to a new level. Many discussions reiterated the need to become better in their own areas of strength and to become aware of areas for development. Creativity is one of our key strengths. So we set out to consider how we can make even better use of our potential for creativity.
The backbone of a well working team is always effective communication and clear division of roles
As a communications professional, I firmly believe that the most important thing is the transparency and volume of internal dialogue. Everyone knows not only their own role but also the role of others. The organization and teams need discussions outside of the work context about how things are done, not just what is done. SmoothTeam is a great tool for that!
The covid epidemic has also affected our year: we already completely transformed the physical learning experience into a virtual one and succeeded so well that we now have a global service. However, the big transformation journey has not lacked challenges and the team’s ability has been measured by how well we are able to create something new and difficult – something that no one has done before.
I can recommend SmoothTeam to communities that want to develop into power teams
I can warmly recommend SmoothTeam to all communities with the ambition to develop into a power team. In our work, we see how the Advisory Board teams work with ambitious goals and painful strategic decisions all the time, and we provide help in that as well. This demands a lot from the team – especially when the organization is still in a growth phase. It is vital for team productivity that we know each other and know how to help, support and encourage according to the situation.
Gold nuggets emerged from the simulation
The best thing about the simulation was the situation created by the excellent facilitator and the inspiring content, which effortlessly generated a common understanding of our team’s collaboration. And then those little gold nuggets – insights that emerged from the discussions during the simulation, and that have already been incorporated into the team’s daily routines.
Elisa Kitunen
Country Manager, EEX Oy