Bureaucracy simplified with video
Lempäälä is a municipality in the Pirkanmaa region of Finland with 23 000 inhabitants. Businesses and enterprises are important to Lempäälä and that’s why it has been chosen as “The most business friendly municipality of the year” several times.
In the change management process of Lempäälä municipality, communication has been chosen as the most important development area. After internal discussions, Lempäälä chose to use online videos in their daily communication.
«We have discussed internally that the message has to be strong and clean during time of change. Videos are a brilliant tool to communicate in a personal way with all our 1 500 employees and with our 23 000 inhabitants.»
Dream Broker offered a test period in the beginning, and after trying out the software in a real-world situation, Lempäälä’s personnel management team had all their doubts removed over how easy the process of making videos could be. Soon after that, they started using videos for internal communication and discovered that the most active users were from the education sector who were using videos for such announcements as holidays and internal guidance. In the area of city planning, the law states that processes and plans must be shared with all residents. The planning unit team has found that video has been the most useful tool for this purpose.
Lempäälä sees multiple benefits in using videos. They can save working hours significantly and when the message reaches the right people in a personal way, it clearly decreases the amount of email queries and phone calls. It also provides recognition to employees that their work has real meaning, because they are able to see how many have watched their videos and how many have actually received the message.
The general consensus of municipalities is that they are bureaucratic, speaking their own language which is not understood by inhabitants.
«When videos were introduced it became a tool that uses common language to explain what a particular decision means and where is it going to lead from the point of inhabitants’ everyday life»
In the future, Lempäälä wants to be known for being the municipality that genuinely wants to seek solutions and move towards them by using different and innovative ways of working.
Heidi Rämö
Mayor
Lempäälä municipality
