Valamis sustainability review of 2022

In 2020, we began our commitment to systematically develop our sustainability. During 2022, we continued taking action to support our values. Here is our summary of what we achieved together!

The Valamis sustainability focus areas are:

• Responsible and Humane Work
• Environmentally Friendly Operations
• Helping Customers to Cut Their Environmental Footprint
• Data Safety and Responsible Use of Data

Responsible and humane work

At Valamis, a sustainable work culture is one of our cornerstones, we want to support well-being, and it is one of our primary focus areas. We offer a wide range of benefits, activities and support to help Valamisians take care of their social, physical and mental well-being. Here are some highlights and new additions to the well-being program from 2022.

Valamis pilots 4-day workweek in Finland

Starting in November 2022, Valamis is currently piloting a four-day workweek among its employees in Finland. Those employees who wish to participate in the pilot will do 80% working time with 90% of their monthly salary. The goal of this initiative is to improve the overall well-being and productivity of employees. Read more about the 4 day week at Valamis.

“For the past fifteen years, we have been building an empathetic company culture, which we will continue to strengthen. In the middle of crises, that culture is the best kind of survival kit a company can have.”

– Maria Vihtkari, CHRO

Supporting the employee experience

At the beginning of 2022 we started using Humbol, a tool which helps us improve our employee experience. Through Humbol, we ensure that every employee has the opportunity to benefit from quality, meaningful development conversations face-to-face with their manager.

Cultural diversity and belonging at Valamis

Valamisians are a diverse group of people. One way we honour this is by celebrating all of the important celebrations and holidays observed by the different cultures within the company throughout the year.
We take care of our own people. When Valamis closed its office in Russia, we invited our talented colleagues to join our office in Joensuu. We supported the relocation of 30 Russian colleagues to Finland.

Learning together

Learning is an important part of any career, even more so when you work for a learning company! Over 2022 we continued to support our employees’ career development with:

• 157 new Valamis lessons and 37 new learning paths were created on our internal Valamis Learning Platform
• 7649 logins by employees to the Valamis Learning Platform! An average of at least 1 login per week per employee!
• 4324 completions of micro-learning content

Environmentally-friendly operations

Valamis considers environmental concerns every day across all of our offices and continued supporting our employees to cut their carbon footprint.

Helping arctic nature conservation 

For our Christmas donation of 2022 we chose to give to the World Wide Fund for Nature | WWF for the conservation of arctic nature in celebration of our mascot, Valbo, the arctic fox.

Bicycling for a good cause

The Valamis team has traditionally participated in the Finnish cycling challenge Kilometrikisa, which helps collect money for charity?. The Valamis team had 15 members this year, from May 1st to September 22nd, they successfully managed to:

• Cycle a total of 12,994 km
• Save 909 litres of gasoline by cycling instead of driving cars
• Save 2,272 kg of Co2-emissions
• Raise 520 Euros to donate to the Finnish Red Cross

Helping customers to cut their environmental footprint

Millions of people use Valamis for digital learning, decreasing the need for learning-related travel in their organisations. Valamis’ product development is about making learning digital and enabling more learning possibilities for its customers and their stakeholders.

To make digital learning more engaging, next year, we will continue developing our learning solution to be even more social and collaborative in order to further support learning within the flow of work. With these tools, learning, sharing knowledge and collaborating digitally will become further streamlined and more interactive. Digital learning is not solely about “completing the learning content.” It is equally, if not more, focused on the social process. With Accessibility/ WCAG 2.1 AA compliancy, we ensure this experience is accessible for all.

When it comes to technology and performance, we continue to develop our software to perform more efficiently and optimise our capacity needs with our MS Azure Cloud. The more efficient the software, the smaller the environmental footprint.

Data safety and responsible use of data

Valamis is committed to the highest level of security and keeping your data fully protected. In 2022 we were re-certified in ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 27017:2021. In addition, and after a detailed audit, we also completed an ISAE 3000 type II (SOC 2) assurance report.

“User and customer data are the most valuable assets we process. Getting an assurance
report and a certificate from a 3rd party, gives us validation that our security measures are up to date and reinforces our dedication to keep all our data secure.”

– Jukka Keto, Security Vice President