Finland’s largest design community builds products and services for OP Financial Group
The cornerstone of everything we do at OP Financial Group is customer-centricity. Design enables us to create an impressive customer experience and business value. One of the key tasks of design work is the integration of design-thinking with the company culture. Continuous enhancement of design maturity and customer insight occurs at both strategic and operational level across the organisation. Design maturity is already highly developed at OP: design helps us to create value in the contexts of our vision and strategy, business concepts, service processes, and product and service development.
Through their work, OP employees impact on millions of daily lives in Finland. Such work is underpinned by a strong design community mainly consisting of designers, but also including design thinkers in a range of other, non-design roles.
Support and sparring from the design community
Designers work in a number of areas, such as business units, units involved in the development of technologies and systems, and centres of excellence. The presence and support of the community is important in daily work. Our design community creates a feeling of belonging and provides a stable home when teams or projects change. The community also provides designers with the opportunity to grow and change their roles within it. A sense of community is reinforced by shared chat channels, events and other forums.
Based on the agile method, designers belong to role-based chapters in which shared practices are established and members spar, developing and sharing professional skills in their competence areas. Chapters also provide the opportunity to meet colleagues working in the same role. On co-working days, our designers spend a working day together in Helsinki and Oulu.
Our design community is hugely important to the employee experience, since it provides a home base for designers wherever they work in OP Financial Group, and a community to which they can always turn for help.
Competence development during work
Our highly valued design community provides plenty of opportunities for competence development. One of its key tasks is to enhance the professional development of designers, helping them to gain new skills. Our competence-sharing culture could be called the backbone of the community: you can always find colleagues who are ready to help and spar. For example, demos discussing the lessons learned in various projects are key elements of competence-sharing – what went extremely well and why. Sharing the lessons from trials that didn’t go quite as planned is just as valuable. Such lessons can improve the entire community’s understanding of the diversity of design work, design elements, and changing development needs.
Our designers structure their working hours around the 70:20:10 model, based on which each employee can use 10 per cent of their time for competence development. OP offers a wide range of internal training, including various courses and clinics. In addition, its six-month competence development tracks (training courses) explore a changing set of design themes, such as AI and futurology. Software Academy’s competence tower, Designing and Leading Value Creation, provides a range of study options for designers and non-designers on topics such as design thinking, customer insight, modern product design philosophy, and the use of AI in business. Studying is done independently and in small discussion groups. .
Design thinking belongs to everyone
Design thinking is a key element of each phase of service and product development. It fosters a culture of experimentation and prototype creation, enabling early-stage agile exploration and solution development based on user feedback.
Our designers are responsible for ensuring that customer-centrism is highlighted at OP, and support the coordination of customer and business value. Through their work, they help to develop our institutional understanding of customer needs, using design methods for problem-solving and business development. Design work also shortens time to market and boosts the development of services.
Because work is done together, within tribes and teams, design cuts across the entire organisation. Design and the customer experience go far beyond the work of designers. Staff interested in these two aspects collaborate, gathering in a range of events and teams to discuss and learn together. In addition to individual designers, OP’s design guild plays an important role in foregrounding design thinking across organisational boundaries, and promotes collaboration between businesses. It also raises the profile of design within organisations, while enabling joint learning among all OP employees interested in design and the customer experience. Design’s customer experience theme weeks provide those interested with the opportunity to participate in a range of training programmes and practical workshops.
Close cooperation, engagement and diverse competence development opportunities guarantee that our customer-centric culture and the promotion of design thinking will remain at the core of OP Financial Group’s work now and in the future.