A targeted workplace survey supports business planning at Puuilo

Puuilo’s store network is extensive, and store managers operate in highly autonomous roles. Store managers are responsible for the smooth running of daily operations, personnel, financial performance, and multiple stakeholders at the same time. However, the demands and level of responsibility can create strain that is difficult to detect through traditional assessments or metrics.

At Puuilo, the goal was to offer managers proactive support in their leadership work while also improving their work ability and wellbeing. As a result, coaching discussions with an occupational health psychologist were introduced.

– We wanted to give managers a calm and confidential moment to reflect on their workload and leadership. At the same time, we gain aggregated insights that help management make better decisions to support managers, Kulmala describes.

These coaching discussions are fully confidential at the individual level, but a themed summary is compiled. This ensures that individual matters remain private, while at the organizational level a clear view is formed of recurring themes and workload factors. Key topics that emerged included work pacing, recovery, working time boundaries, and whether managers felt they received sufficient support in their daily work.

– In situations where workplace conflicts place a burden on managers, support is also sought at the team or workplace level. These challenges may emerge in manager coaching discussions or employee surveys, and based on these we have utilized organizational psychologists to support managers in resolving workplace conflicts, Kulmala explains.

Today, coaching discussions have become an established part of regular occupational health collaboration, and managers have come to expect and prepare for them.

Aggregated insights helped identify broader patterns

One key insight from the coaching discussions related to managing working hours and taking breaks. This was addressed quickly by reinforcing the importance of breaks and paying closer attention to working time monitoring.

At the same time, a new realization emerged: although the discussions highlighted workload issues, the specific characteristics of managerial work were still not being examined in sufficient depth within traditional workplace assessments. This led to the decision to conduct a targeted workplace assessment focusing specifically on store managers’ roles and their workload factors.

– In traditional workplace assessments, the specific characteristics of managerial work can easily be overlooked. By targeting the assessment to a role rather than a unit of the organization, we wanted to make visible the workload factors of store managers and increase our understanding of how we can influence them, Kulmala explains.

A targeted workplace assessment provided new insights for leadership

The role-specific workplace assessment proved exceptionally valuable at Puuilo. It brought forward issues that had not previously been identified. One concrete example was the exceptional workload at the turn of the month, caused by the accumulation of tasks such as payroll checks, cash reconciliations, store changes, and tight deadlines occurring simultaneously.

The results of the assessment were reviewed by the leadership team, which decided to respond by adjusting work structures. In practice, this meant reassessing schedules and expectations: some tasks were given more time, and requirements were reprioritized to smooth out workload peaks.

– When schedules and expectations became more flexible, feedback from managers was immediate and very positive. A follow-up survey is also planned after a year, as we want to see whether the changes are reflected in everyday work, Kulmala says.

Overall, the targeted workplace assessment served as a management tool, providing decision-support data that would not have been obtained through organization-level assessments. It reinforced the idea that managerial work should be examined as its own entity, and that occupational health data can be directly leveraged to develop both leadership practices and business operations.