How Nokia Engages Its Employees During Virtual Meetings with Slido

Nokia is creating technology that connects people globally, offers a comprehensive portfolio of network equipment, software, services and licensing opportunities across the globe with its 106,000 employees in 100+ countries. The technology to keep everyone everywhere connected has never been more important.

The company is also a frontrunner in keeping its teams connected by hosting virtual meetings. One of their challenges during these calls was increasing participation and interaction. They wanted to spark up the engagement and that’s why they came to Slido.

In this story, communication experts at Nokia, Vera Kiss and Viola Cserti share how Slido helped their two communities in the operations department to drive engagement and give a voice to their employees.

A quest to increase engagement during all-hands calls

Even before the pandemic, Vera and Viola were streaming the organizations’ monthly and quarterly all hands call to share the latest updates from their leaders focusing on business and project updates, performance review and other current topics to engage with their teams.

During these all hands calls, they always reserved time for Q&A but before using Slido they had the challenge of having only very few, if at all, questions coming from the audience - even with up to five hundred people on the line.

This challenge partially came from the fact of not having the option to ask their questions anonymously or upvote an already existing question to express your support to a colleague’s question. This resulted in less interaction and relevance of content to the audience as the organizations ‘voice’ was not openly heard.

The teams needed a change and the aim was clear: engage more employees during the calls, create more interaction, let everyone see all questions and find a way to provide anonymity.

Changing the approach to employee questions with Slido

The first step was moving the all hands call Q&A to Slido to create a culture of transparency and provide an anonymous platform for Q&A.

One of Nokia’s core values is ‘respect’ and it plays an important role when employees are instructed on how to use Sli.do: only respectful language is allowed and questions that are related to the topics covered.

The unit leaders wanted to have an open and transparent way of tackling all the questions and comments coming from the audience, therefore Slido’s moderation feature is not in use.

Change can be hard and challenging but with the right tool and mindset they were able to create real time interaction during their virtual meetings and stayed true to Nokia’s culture of openness and transparency.

Employees value their openness.

Building trust through openness and anonymity

When the time comes for the Q&A Vera and Viola start sharing the questions on full screen. They use top-rated selection to see what the hot topics are. The order of questions is quickly changing while more questions start to pop up.

While the original time for Q&A was extended from 10 to 20 minutes, as the active participation has been continuously increasing, some of the comments and questions need to be covered even after the call.

The next big step was bringing the polls in the picture

It's tough to keep our employees’ attention during virtual meetings, so Vera and Viola try to run a poll frequently to keep them engaged. The teams use polls mainly in three ways. For quick pulse checks, word clouds for internal employee recognition and to provide feedback from the session.

The result: Stronger bond between leaders and employees

Using Slido during virtual meetings has helped Nokia’s teams to energize their calls and boost interaction. It also helped the teams adapt to the fully virtual setup and strengthened their community during the pandemic.

These conversations continue after the meetings, too. Our communities became a lot more active as a result, Vera and Viola conclude smiling.