Efficient strategic alignment requires transparent and straightforward communication

Original article published in Finnish at itewiki.fi, written by Vilma Mikkonen

Organizational decision making is often confined in silos. Decision making processes don’t reach all employees, which makes pursuing the common goals extremely challenging. We interviewed the founder of digital software provider Fingertip, Jaakko Pellosniemi, about the subject.

Pellosniemi is seasoned in many industries but has recently found himself poised to solve the wicked problems around digital leadership. He noticed a number of clear weaknesses in the ways organizations have attempted to lead with digital tools, and decided to found Fingertip to solve the glaring issues.

Decentralized communication makes strategy processes hard

One of the big challenges he noticed was decision making and effective implementation of strategy.

“Decision making is one of the central processes in knowledge work organizations, yet it often only creates trouble”, Pellosniemi notes. According to him, challenges in decision making are often caused by decentralized communication. Organizations make decisions, plans and strategies, that are transparent to just some parts of the company. This separates the processes from their daily leadership and operations, frustrating strategic alignment.

Communicational issues go both ways: Discussions between employees are often separate from task management, project leadership, and, above all, decision making. These talks related to the organization never reach the decision makers themselves.

Transparent and collaborative decision making is the basis for data-backed leadership and the best customer experience, according to Pellosniemi. By connecting communication and plans, decisions, projects, customers, and goals, work can flow freely through the organization – which is what makes it effective. Fingertip was founded to assist in that.

Fingertip simplifies processes in different areas

Fingertip is the engine for leading modern organizations, per Pellosniemi. It attempts to simplify leadership communication and documenting previously invisible processes transparently.

“Fingertip makes knowledge work pull-oriented and improves the potential for employees to influence the processes. Collaborative decisions, meetings planned together, openly shared responsibilities and tasks, and self-directed objectives all reduce the need for one-way communication and waiting”, Pellosniemi describes.

“Fingertip has evolved into a leadership system, that supports the leading theories in leadership and work psychology.”

In Fingertip, roles, responsibilities, and dependencies are made clear as day. This way, the service offers an online repository of all work items in progress.

“Files, key strategic initiatives, and daily decisions, meetings, and tasks are available to the entire organization. Processes have an owner and a deadline, and they’re linked together via transparent relations into a network”, Pellosniemi states.

Transparency helps Fingertip’s customers stay on top of made decisions and current projects. Pellosniemi says, that the platform reduces the need for separate task management software or spreadsheets. It helps management keep up to date on ongoing processes, and vice versa.

Mastering a familiar software is faster

While digitalization seeps into every facet of knowledge work, learning new tools constantly can be very demanding. “Jumping between different software causes painful switching costs, and the user experience suffers from lack of knowledge and skills”, describes Pellosniemi.

Fingertip offers efficiency on the wildly popular Microsoft Teams communication platform. This reduces the strain on employees related to learning a completely new system.

“One thing most knowledge workers in Finland have in common is Microsoft Teams”, Pellosniemi states. Microsoft has more than 2,7 million licensed users in Finland, and most organizations facilitate discussion using Teams. It is the basis for collaboration and strategy implementation, but its adoption has been lackluster, according to Pellosniemi.

Fingertip has created an intuitive leadership experience inside of Microsoft Teams. It improves transparency, goal orientation, and situational awareness. Fingertip wants to provide both knowledge workers as well as leaders the best leader’s experience on the world’s most utilized business communication platform. “It’s only a matter of time when all knowledge work transfers to hybrid mode. Then, the winners will be those, whose working practices best support that”, Pellosniemi finishes.