Symbio was a software development partner in implementing a digital LoTo (Lockout Tagout) safety solution for Stora Enso’s Imatra Kaukopää factory. A LoTo solution is used during factory’s service and maintenance to ensure the safety of the employees. LoTo solution ensures that the production line or part of it cannot be operational until the maintenance work is completed. When the production line is closed for maintenance, for example the valves of the line are closed and after closing, they are secured with a physical lock so that no one can accidentally open the valves during the maintenance work.

What Was the Project Scope?

In the new digital solution, maintenance workers have a mobile application instead of a traditional paper notebook to keep track on the safety plan. Maintenance workers use the mobile application to mark the locks locked or unlocked. Each lock is digitally identified, and maintenance work can only be started when all the locks in the locking plan have been acknowledged as locked. This significantly reduces the risk of human errors compared to taking notes on a paper.

When the maintenance work is done, the locks are opened in the reverse order, and they are marked opened in the application. Employees can see the status of locks related to their maintenance work in real time, and they can be assured of work safety. Employees can also comment on events using the application. In addition to the mobile application, the solution includes a dashboard view for control room employees, from which they can update the security plan and monitor its progress in real time.

Symbio was Stora Enso’s software development partner in the LoTo project.  Together with Stora Enso Imatra team, a concept and a Proof of Concept were made to verify the functionality of the concept in a real environment. After the Proof of Concept, the team proceeded to the final solution that was put into production at Stora Enso’s Imatra factory.

What is Stora Enso’s Global Safety Awards?

Stora Enso Global Safety Awards is an award given in the Stora Enso organization for excellent work in promoting occupational safety. The winners of the award can be exemplary in promoting safety practices, in innovative solutions to prevent work accidents, or in showing excellent results in strengthening the occupational safety culture in the organization.

LoTo solution received an award in the “Controlling Safety Risks” category, which focuses on preventive actions and risk management in the work environment. The category awards a solution that:

• Eliminates a safety risk during construction or development phase of machines
• Provides effective mitigating measures to avoid a possible accident and protect the employee
• Reduce or eliminate an identified risk
• Improves everyday safety in a work process, working conditions and work environment
• Utilizes digital solutions when necessary

What the Award Means to Symbio?

Symbio’s Sales Director Riitta Vaajamo is excited on the news. “Safety is a united effort. We  have worked together with Stora Enso team, and the team truly deserves this award. It has been exciting to be part of the cooperation and the process that increases the safety of Stora Enso factory. Overall, the cooperation has already lasted for four years, and we are very happy that Stora Enso has trusted us in the collaboration.”

Self-organizing, non-hierarchical teams are nothing new. But still, most companies have not selected an organization model that suit their needs, ending up using the default hierarchical model driven by the PowerPoint org chart templates available for the managing director.

Back in 2020, Symbio’s Mika, Jarkko and Markus met and discussed how we at Symbio might best adapt to the complexity and speed of change of the surrounding world. Very quickly we came into conclusion: the hierarchical organization models previously tried were no more fit. Quoting Einstein ”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Instead, we decided to try something completely different as Symbio organization.

O2 Organization

During a short period of intense study, we set goals to build a team-based organization making decisions quickly on team level, learning from each other and self-organizing ourselves as far as we can. We selected Organic Organization (O2) as the model because it is, like Scrum, based on very few rules, is simple and reasonably easy to understand and adapt.

The rules of O2 are written in the meta-agreements. Instead of management team and a hierarchy of square boxes building silos, O2 consists of organic teams called Circles. The largest circle was named O2 Circle One (O2C1), consisting of Symbio people with largest responsibility areas. So, the life of the O2 organization begun.

How does the O2 work in practice?

In O2, organizational structure is based on Circles consisting of Roles. As an example, People & Culture (P&C) is a circle within the O2C1. It was created with a goal to renew traditional HR, being a cross-functional team of human resources, recruitment and delivery specialists assigned in roles. In two years, the circle has evolved and worked on weekly basis to reach its purpose:

Support Symbio People on every step of our journey to find and live our professional purpose, and to build and communicate our culture together.

A Circle is a Role that has authority to break itself down in smaller Roles, effectively forming a team authorized to fill its purpose. Each circle has essential roles like Outer Link accountable of structuring the circle, and Secretary who arranges the meetings and records the outputs.

How O2 Meetings are Run?

A circle meets regularly. Each meeting is led by the Facilitator and is structured in five modes. In the Review mode, the goal is to give transparency about the work performed by the roles. Tensions are often recognized already in this mode. In the following Sync mode, everyone has an opportunity to get their tensions heard and processed.

If resolving any of the of the tensions would affect the circle structure, such as creating a new role, they are resolved in the Adapt mode. The optional Select mode is used to elect the partners in the essential role. Finally, the Care mode is for team building, just human beings talking each other outside the official roles. The chit-chat moments in the beginning and end of the meetings, are natural ways to build trust and care within the team.

In practice, the five modes give the facilitator and the whole team a practical and efficient way of sharing progress, to get heard and discuss important topics. Most of the time is usually spent on review and sync modes. Most of the meetings are recorded too, to help secretary to capture tensions and decisions, and possibly absent partners to catch up.

During the two years, we have been satisfied with the O2. Symbio O2 organization has evolved to several circles, and helped us to adapt to changes in environment. We see no going back to the traditional organization charts!

A couple of years back, software developer Tero Jarkko from Oulu sat down with his friends in a summer cabin sauna, the place where serious conversations happen. This time, also work-related issues were discussed. Tero was already an experienced coder who had spent a couple of decades in product development houses, but now thoughts of looking for a change in work had occupied his mind. A guy who had worked at Symbio for a long time told about the possibilities of consulting work at the right time. Tero thought that as a senior-oriented and established company, Symbio could offer exactly the change in the content of his work and new stimulation through project and consulting work.

Tero has been satisfied with his decision to join Symbio.

“Work is a big part of life and it is important to be able to enjoy work. Symbio has met my expectations as a workplace and everything that was said about the workplace during the recruitment phase has been very true and I have enjoyed myself. I have found big enough challenges and discussed various project possibilities. With Symbio, you can talk and exchange ideas with everyone. Symbio’s expertise is deep and wide-ranging, and I have been able to learn new things about, for example, cloud computing”.

Tero feels that as a workplace, Symbio has offered more than just work-related activities.

“I have made a lot of new friends and we have done things together even in our freetime. For example, the Sunday formula studios in Symbio Oulu office’s Lounge are concrete demonstrations of community and spending time together outside of work”

We asked from our employees, what kind of training would be useful in their work and in many discussions Robot Framework came up. So, we wanted to offer a crash course on that. Also, while we believe that learning by doing is powerful, especially with software programming and frameworks, we decided to arrange a Robot Framework hackathon.

As an introduction to the topic, our Robot Framework specialist Sayed Tenkanen gave a Robot Framework 101 to the hackathon teams. Then it was time to start to “hack a ton” out of Robot Framework! We had teams participating in Helsinki and Oulu offices and the hackathon topic was to try out Robot Framework in a context selected by the team. Teams had one day time to make a demo implementation and then the results were presented in Symbio’s weekly virtual coffee break. The code the teams developed was available in a repository for everyone at Symbio to explore.

Efficient teamwork

Helsinki team used Liveshare to make working together more efficient. Everyone was working in the same room on their own computers and one machine was used to do the test run. The team used Selenium keywords library and wrote their own keyword library using Python. The team in Oulu faced challenges with web drivers in the beginning that took time from the actual implementation. However, after the initial challenges, the team reached full speed and both teams were able to complete the hackathon and give a demo run for the audience.

Feelings From Hackathon

As it usually goes in hackathons, the time flies fast. Teams were working enthusiastically and had fun in developing the solutions. Teams learned how the Robot Framework helps in making automations: it generates informative reports, and it is suitable for building almost any kind of automation. The participants were able to try integrations using different programming languages and everyone’s expertise in the world of test automation grew substantially.

The feedback from the participants was that a hackathon is a good way to learn something new by doing and that we should organize hackathons in the future as well.

Could you tell us who you are and what is your role at Symbio?

Hello! I’m Riitta and I’m in charge of sales at Symbio. My goal is of course to grow the business, but my daily job includes a lot of other things as well, such as being a supervisor for salespeople, and developing the customer relationships. Usually in the organization, the sales director is an administrative supervisor, but I also have a sales quota myself. I like it because I want to stay in touch with the daily customer work and the realities of sales. To manage sales, you need to understand what the customer values and what the customer needs.

Hmm, it would be related to business in some way. Perhaps my own business related to animal welfare, like a veterinary clinic, or dog or horse physiotherapy. I’ve already helped my friends’ animals in my spare time and it’s a very satisfying thing to do. I’ve done show jumping with horses before, but now my four-legged friends have shrunk from horses to English bulldogs.

Symbio has a strong culture of remote work and hybrid work. How has it fit into your lifestyle?

Symbio already adopted remote work very well during the first Covid wave. And actually, during that time we got one of the biggest project wins. Of course, sales has its own challenges remotely, when you can’t interpret people’s sign language that well, and formation in the remote meetings had to be re-planned. For example, a remote meeting that was not rehearsed easily led to talking over others. But when the roles and presentations were rehearsed in advance and everyone was clear on their role, it turned in to our favor.

In general, the hybrid model is good, the extremes are not. When the model works well, it is also an advantage, and everyone feels happier. For instance, it was really nice yesterday when we went to lunch in the city center with the team, while other days I can work remotely. Our sales team is in different locations, in Helsinki and Oulu, but still our relations are very warm even though we rarely see each other. There are also customers in different time zones outside of Finland, and project work is done with people from different cultures.

Do you have a fun fact to share about yourself that you wouldn’t guess at first glance?

I am a good chef. My specialties are all Italian dishes like pastas, veal chops, antipasti, etc. People often think that if you’ve made a career, you can’t even boil water, but I can cook even for a larger group.