Over the years, I have worked as a coach with several hundred different companies from very different industries. I have been on the front lines making various observations about how the growing challenges of working life and various changes are being implemented in companies. In my role, I have helped management to look at reality through the eyes of the employee and vice versa. The single biggest and most generalizable challenge is how to experience the changes and the related demands as positively as possible. The core of everything is the commitment of an individual person and thereby a larger group of employees to the company's promise and to redeem it. We have also tried to activate such an active, professional and customer-oriented lever of collective power at Dimex.
If the challenges of working life had to be somehow generalized and wrapped into one sentence that unites both management and employees, it would probably be: “How do we combine joy at work and productivity in an ever-changing world?” Together with Dimex management and staff, we’ve been thinking very carefully about how this shared challenge relates to workwear. The conclusions are indisputable: workwear has a very significant and increasingly important impact on employee wellbeing and commitment and, from there, on productivity. When an employee puts on the company uniform every day, a workwear solution that’s just okay simply isn’t enough to get them into the best possible mindset for delivering on the company promise. We’ve also genuinely shared the view that in many industries people are the company’s media as employees – and quite a significant one at that – so it’s pointless to dismiss various visibility-related factors and details as daydreaming. The workwear has to feel absolutely amazing to its user and, if they move around among people even a little, it has to look impressive too!
At Dimex, the recipe for insanely good workwear has been packaged into the 4T customer promise: safety, functionality, style and satisfaction. At Dimex they are very much aware that the best workwear on the market is created when you dedicate yourself to developing these with exceptional passion together with good and demanding customers. In our coaching cooperation, we’ve focused especially on how we can take a bigger and, in particular, more active role in developing the entire workwear market. We believe we’ve found excellent ways to do this that make our customers’ lives easier and richer, and we intend to put them into practice “with our heads in the clouds but our feet firmly on the ground”.
With a twinkle in my eye and inspired by my coaching experiences, I could even draw some labour market policy conclusions that Dimex is the largest single domestic labour market player that is so strongly on the side of the employee and, best of all, equally on the side of the employer. It’ll be interesting to see what role opens up with these arguments in the next national labour agreement negotiations. Until now I’ve been firmly of the opinion that the best way to combine joy at work and productivity is exceptionally good leadership, but over this autumn I’ve realized that in this demanding sport it wouldn’t hurt at all to have an insanely good set of workwear either.
In Espoo on 09/11/2009 voluntarily, without compensation, impressed, sincerely :)
Harri Tammiruusu
Coaching Consultant
Trainers’ House Plc