How Nokia made environmentalism relevant to its employees

By Daniel Penton

Companies are feeling the pinch in ways that were unthinkable just over a year ago. The time where you could fly a sales team to another country for a one-day meeting is history (for the time being at least). Instead, companies struggling to survive the economic conditions are resorting to anything to survive. Inevitably this has had an effect on internal communication along with environmental efforts.

The environment, and internal communication, is arguably more important in the longer term than the economy, which will eventually recover. The recovery of the environment is not so certain however. So how does a company go about communicating this important subject with their staff when they are surrounded by the recession and everything that goes with it?

Nokia, the Finnish multinational communications corporation, faced this challenge ahead of going public with newly defined company environmental initiatives called the power of we. The challenge of letting employees know about the new initiatives was made more difficult when you consider the company employs just over 125,000 people in operations around the world working from factory floor to retail locations and beyond.

Goals of the campaign

“We wanted to raise awareness around our environmental performance, also internally to encourage debate and discussion around our future targets, and to engage an increasing amount of our employees in environmental actions and practice in everything we do,” remembers Kirsi Sormunen, VP of Environmental Affairs at the company.

“We believe in the power of the individuals together to make a real change and help the environment, starting from ourselves as employees of Nokia,” Anastasia Orkina, Director of Environmental Marketing, says when explaining why they first focused on employees before going public with the power of we.

From the outset, the campaign’s targets were set high, with the ultimate aim being to inform at least 50% of Nokia’s global workforce about the company’s environmental programme and to engage a minimum of 1,000 people as active environmental champions during its first year.

Because environmental issues were already loosely embedded within the company, the main change to communicate was the existence of five main pillars created to illustrate the power of we in more concrete ways. They were: we:evolve, we:create, we:energise, we:recycle, and we:support.

Before going live on the internal campaign, Nokia’s internal environmental website was renewed to support the campaign and became the core communication hub surrounding Nokia’s internal discussion on environmental affairs. Multimedia and user generated content were at the heart of the internal engagement campaign and included screensavers, intranet articles, videos, photos, blogs and quizzes.
 
Themes

The campaign covered a different environmental theme each quarter, with the development of new content and events used to spread each particular message around the world. The first theme was recycling, with the aim of raising awareness about mobile phone recycling and, in particular, to get Nokia employees to recycle their old mobile phones, chargers and accessories.

This mini campaign kicked off at Nokia’s global headquarters in Espoo, Finland -  a workplace of over 1,000 people. An eco-friendly recycling installation was put in place and over 700 mobile phones and 800 accessories were recycled over the course of just one day. Following the successful pilot, a recycling toolkit was developed so that any Nokia office around the world had all the materials and information needed to put on their own event. All events were filmed and posted onto Nokia’s global intranet to share thinking and stimulate action company-wide.

Following the recycling drive, the next theme was travel, aimed to change employees’ attitudes about the subject. Dubbed ‘travelogic’, the central concept was that it’s only ideas that need to travel, not people. The challenge was to inspire employees to get their ideas across rather than get on a plane.

One of the main ways to drive awareness of this was to ground some of the company’s biggest travelers and get them to record video diaries and blog internally about their experiences. This proved an effective way of starting a conversation about using this new way of thinking to stay on the ground and still remain productive.

The long run

The power of we campaign is a long-term strategy, so the company also developed a range of structural initiatives to ensure its longevity. One of the best received was the ‘we:champion’ programme, where employees with a passion for the environment volunteered for the responsibility to actively stimulate internal change and make Nokia’s environmental aims become a reality. To help them in this task, a dedicated forum was designed to facilitate debate and encourage the sharing of ideas with fellow champions around the world. By the end of last year, there were we:champions in 30 countries, including over 800 in China alone. The activities that they are involved in range from tree planting to environmental education at local schools.

Another structural initiative was the ‘we:reward’ programme, designed to get Nokia people to change the way they live and work in an entertaining and informative way. An online platform was specially designed for people to pledge their eco-actions with people receiving points for each action. Similar to a loyalty scheme, the points could be exchanged by staff for rewards.

It is easy being green

The internal communication campaign has been received well across the company with concrete benefits realised. The recycling rate of used phones and accessories among Nokia employees has increased 600% compared to previous efforts. Over 1,200 we:champions have signed and Nokia employees worldwide have made 4,000 eco-pledges on their own actions with the number growing each day. To top it all Nokia went beyond the initial aim of informing half the workforce of its environmental initiatives eventually making 73% of employees aware of the company’s efforts in this area.

“There is a strong commitment to continue building internal and external engagement around environmental issues - we are definitely on the right track now,” Orkina concludes.

The challenge for Nokia will be to continue the precedent set with the power of we programme in the face of dwindling consumer demand and, ultimately, profits. Sormunen sounds confident that this is not the case, recently being quoted saying: “It (the environment) is very much built into Nokia DNA and culture. As a Finnish company, respect for the environment and communities around us has been a core element in Nokia values.”