Wärtsilä – Quality content supporting the people to spearhead culture transformation

Project goal: Supporting digital transformation

Wärtsilä is a global leader in smart technologies and comprehensive lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets. As an industry pioneer it’s crucial for Wärtsilä to be a driving force of digital transformation. To raise awareness around core digital and behavioral themes, engaging digital content modules was needed.  The goal was to engage Wärtsilä’s people in over 200 locations from all over the world into digital transformation more than before.

The cooperation between Paper Planes and Wärtsilä began in early 2018 when Wärtsilä was looking for a partner to plan and produce digital content to meet the strategy requirements. The goal was to promote a culture of continuous transformation throughout the organization with the help of engaging, high-quality digital content. The project criteria included the content to have a human-centered approach, and for it to be interactive, inclusive, and inspiring, and leveraging a storytelling approach when creating the digital microlearning.

Solution: Interactive micro content

The first steps of the cooperation included defining the project goals, the target audience, and the tone of voice, as well as concept creation. As a result of this concept and strategy work, microlearning became the approach of choice. Offering the content as bite-sized modules for the organization will accelerate the awareness around the relevant topics.

During the content production phase, the content specialists of Paper Planes worked in a close collaboration with Wärtsilä’s experts to produce packages about the broad digital awareness for the company’s platform supporting the transformation. The content was produced in English and has included themes from leadership to latest manufacturing methods.

As for the content formats, the options were kept open in the concepting phase to enable learning and engagement through different methods. It’s also important for Wärtsilä to include their experts in all stages of the content development and this was taken into consideration throughout the project. During the cooperation Paper Planes together with the Wärtsilä culture transformation team, has planned, scripted, and produced a variety of content from bite-sized videos with performers to animations and voice-over videos, as well as tests, assignments and even interactive videos.

Peer-to-peer learning is an efficient way to learn, which is why one of the goals has also been to include Wärtsilä’s people in the content work and empower the company’s experts as content creators. Paper Planes has planned and facilitated workshops for Wärtsilä’s experts on many topics, such as microlearning, microcopy, and storytelling making Wärtsilä experts more skilled in content creation, storytelling and sharing content experiences.

Project result: Coherent digital content supporting transformation

As a result of the cooperation, there has been engaging digital content supporting the digital transformation at Wärtsilä. Many formats have been tested within the concept and the content has been developed based on user feedback and analytics.

Benefits of the collaboration in a nutshell:

• Promoting digital transformation in a human-centric way
• Easily digestible content through the principles of microlearning
• Fresh and coherent content in versatile and interactive formats
• Making difficult subject matters comprehensible through human-to-human approach, easy-to-understand language and active sharing
• Increasing awareness and engagement through storytelling
• Including and empowering experts in content planning and production

Collaboration across departments and companies

Wärtsilä’s teamwork-centered, cross-departmental internal project coordination has had a crucial role in the culture transformation. The digital transformation team includes everyone at Wärtsilä, and the team keeps developing, growing and working as a team towards a common goal, including more and more internal subject matter experts and external partners.

From the very start, one of the project goals was to get Wärtsilä’s experts engaged in the content development. The cooperation has moved to a phase where Paper Planes is a transformation awareness content partner who supports and spars Wärtsilä’s internal content creation and helps with the technical production. Naturally Paper Planes is always ready to help by taking a bigger content producer role whenever extra hands are needed.