How inspiration supports success? – Yle Tech Talk

What escalated from the first goal to improve public speaking skills of a small group within the organization, ended up as an innovative new concept to give a voice to colleagues.

We often talk to audiences who represent clients, stakeholders or other external focus groups. What if we would organize an event for our colleagues to tell us about the everyday work from within the organization in an impactful and inspiring way?

This is what we witnessed at Yle – the national broadcaster in Finland. A professionally produced (Terhi Nikkilä) half a day event with a competent moderator (Leevi Heino) and four keynote speeches all telling the story of what yle.dev does. This was an internal event that gathered 100+ colleagues to participate both in person and through livestream to hear the latest updates and to get inspired by internal development. In other words, they went from quarterly updates and other meetings to a professionally organized event to inspire and communicate internally.

The idea of Yle Tech Talk was initially born during a verbal communications course, MySpeaker Rhetorich, which a group of yle.dev. people joined in spring 2023. The grand mission behind the MySpeaker Rhetorich is to change the world for the better through impactful speech. A cool new twist is an innovative AI supported technology that measures individual speaking skills. The Rhetorich Learning Program combines the best competences of both technology and professional coaches.

“This experience is perfect for people with basic or intermediate presentation skills, who want to improve their performance skills. Yle is full of media professionals, but e.g. not all working in tech have that kind of a background.” Samuli Pöntinen summarizes.

During the Rhetorich training in spring, the group used the AI tool for measuring their speaking skills, learning course content from the platform and received both group and individual coaching to improve their speech and performance. After the learning program one participant wrote a blog post stating how a roller derby talk changed the company culture.

“I was not prepared to realize my purpose in work life during a speech course – but here we are!“ Eeva Partanen wrote.

Over the years Yle has also become a tech-house providing world class content and digital services to all audiences. Hence the development of data, digitalization and digital services are greatly focused on in the organization.

The first ever Yle Tech Talk covered four relevant topics:

• Data democratization
• Organizational culture
• Personalized digital services
• Cyber security

The opening keynote was about data democratization at Yle by the Head of Data, Samuli Pöntinen. This well scripted speech gave ideas on how to make sure that the data is easily accessible and utilized in all departments of the organization. The vision is to support better service, content and decision making in everyday work.

Next up was Domain owner, Eeva Partanen with her personal inspirational story on organizational culture. This is an awesome example of how work life balance gives purpose and drive for career development and building a genuinely diverse culture of wellbeing.

Riikka Lätti, domain owner for personalization technologies, gave insight on how the personalized and “Yle experience” is provided for all within the organization. This was covered by giving vivid examples on what is important for customers and benchmarking on what other national broadcasters have done for this.