What makes a person come back to their old workplace? Not all new employees are actually new to Solita. There are several returners working on their second round at Solita. Many of them have returned to Solita within the past year. I interviewed three of them to find out why they found Solita appealing again.
High autonomy to do one’s work
People usually switch jobs when they’re presented with an interesting opportunity where they can develop their expertise and move on in their career. That’s also what happened with Anne-Mari Laitala, who worked in Solita the first time in 2017. She was lured into a large company, from where she returned to Solita a year ago. Anne-Mari now works as project manager in Oulu office. Coming back was easy because she was welcomed by familiar colleagues and excited to start on interesting projects.
“For me autonomy is really important”, Anne-Mari says. “I came from a large company where there were quite a lot of guidelines and rules. Here everything is so much more flexible, and I can decide myself how I’m working and how things are done in a project. Maybe in a big company things are more often done according to standard process which doesn’t always scale that well to smaller projects.”
Solitans generally value autonomy. From Peakon results, autonomy is regarded as 8.5 in Solita. Basically, it means that people are given enough freedom on deciding how they are doing their work, and freedom to make decisions and lack of unnecessary bureaucracy.
People are great
It might not come as a surprise that caring and clever colleagues are one key thing to affect the decision on coming back to Solita.
“When I heard other people are also coming back to Solita, it was a good signal for me. I already knew whom I was going to work with. People here are intelligent and stimulating. That really inspired me to start working here again”, says Jussi Koskinen.
Jussi works as a people lead and project manager in Development unit in Tampere. He came back this spring after being away for three years.
“I didn’t have any second thoughts on coming back to Solita. I spoke with a lot of people here and I noticed how well our values are realised in the everyday life”, he continues.
Culture has remained strong despite of the pandemic and growth in recent years.
“It’s surprising how there are so many communities within a community here in Solita. When a new person starts in Oulu, everyone welcomes them in the #oulu Slack channel”, says Anne-Mari.
Something big is happening
“There’s a momentum we’re living now in Solita”, says Risto Saari. “We’re now genuinely an international company and I think it is inevitable that there’s going to be more structure on how we do things. I don’t see that a bad thing. We still have a lot of freedom on how we do our work. There’s still some of the old garage culture left.”
Risto works in Data unit as Customer Solutions Architect and builds the concept, selling and solutions of IoT and Edge. He came back to the Solita Tampere office this spring.
“It’s great that there’s more diversity here. Different backgrounds bring more perspective”, Risto says.
In recent years there has been a lot of emphasis on leadership and giving support to people leads. In Jussi’s opinion this reflects on quality.
“We have always had an excellent technical quality in what we have done, but now I think Solita represents something exceptional.”
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