CLIENT
Aava Medical Centre is a rapidly growing family-owned healthcare group comprising Aava and Pikkujätti. As medium-sized challengers in the Finnish healthcare market, the companies had built distinctive customer brands and a strong, community-oriented culture.
Rapid growth, however, was putting pressure on the employee experience. Aava initially approached Co-founders to strengthen its employer brand, but the work soon revealed a broader question about how the organisation itself needed to develop as the business grew.
CHALLENGE
The initial challenge appeared to be one of employer branding: how could Aava and Pikkujätti articulate what made them distinctive employers and compete successfully for talent?
Our research suggested that communication alone would not solve the issue. Some of the factors affecting the employee experience were rooted more deeply in how the growing organisation operated.
The question therefore shifted from how to communicate the employee experience to:
How could Aava preserve what made its culture distinctive while developing the organisation for its next stage of growth?
PROCESS
We began by analysing existing organisational data and listening to employees across different levels, functions and locations through focus groups and in-depth interviews.
The work helped distinguish between the strengths that genuinely differentiated Aava and Pikkujätti and the underlying organisational issues limiting the employee experience. These findings allowed us to broaden the original assignment and bring the deeper strategic questions to the top management team.
Based on this understanding, we developed recommendations and a framework for prioritising organisational development alongside a renewed employer brand strategy, narrative and employee value proposition.
The employer brand therefore became not simply a communications exercise, but an articulation of an employee experience that the organisation itself needed to be able to deliver.
WHAT CHANGED
The process gave Aava and Pikkujätti a clearer understanding of both the distinctive strengths of their culture and the organisational issues that needed attention as the companies continued to grow.
The leadership team received a strategic framework for prioritising the development of the employee experience, while the new employer brand strategy, story and value proposition translated the organisation’s strengths into a clearer promise to current and future employees.
The work connected culture, organisational development and employer promise, helping Aava approach employer branding not simply as something to communicate, but as something the organisation needed to make true in everyday experience.
