Please tell me about the biggest challenge you've faced since you joined?

One of the biggest challenges I face is getting the attention of potential candidates to stop and consider Nokia as a potential employer. What I find is that when we are able to cut through and share the Nokia story...it's a very compelling one with a supportive culture and a very positive work environment. However, in an era where we are bombarded with hundreds of elements on our social media channels...where mere seconds of attention are all you have to try and "pause the scroll"...it's not that easy. So to overcome this challenge, my team continually works on new solutions and ideas to share and engage with candidates including this very tool that allows real conversations between candidates and employees. We hope that trying to create a variety of engagement options will reach the diversity of candidates we want to bring to Nokia.

Thank you for your question. I joined Nokia in 2016 resulting from its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. I feel that the biggest challenge I’ve faced since joining Nokia is maintaining a reasonable balance between my work life and my personal life. Nokia encourages its employees to find balance in their personal and work lives. Being successful with a company in the technology sectors means keeping up with the rapid pace of change – Nokia’s organizational and business changes, customer driven business and organizational changes, as well as changes in the information, processes, tools, knowledge, skills, behaviours, capabilities, personnel, and communications needed to do our jobs. It takes time to do the job and more time to learn and integrate “change” effectively into one’s role. Having balance in our lives is healthy and necessary because we all (hopefully) have responsibilities and interests outside of work too. Some have spouses, some don’t. Some have children, some don’t. Some have additional responsibilities (e.g., elderly parents), some don’t. Some have activities and hobbies, some don’t. Some need a good night’s sleep, and it seems that some don’t 😊. That said, we must make a living to support ourselves; but we also need to “live” and enjoy our lives. Having balance in one’s life is important and a goal worthy to pursue. I seek to maintain work life/personal life balance by setting boundaries; for example, establishing specific start and end times to my workday seems to work reasonably well for me. Of course (because Nokia is a global company), there are days that I must start early, some days that I finish late, and other days that I do both. I for one appreciate that Nokia recognizes and supports employee’s balance between work and personal life. In fact, in 2021, Nokia provided each employee with a “recharge” day off – an extra day off in addition to our allocated vacation and holidays.