Strategy Becomes Action When Everyone Understands What It Means in Their Own Work

Strategy Becomes Action When Everyone Understands What It Means in Their Own Work

Organizations invest significant time and effort in developing strategy. Leadership defines the goals, priorities, and direction for the business. Yet one challenge remains remarkably consistent across organizations: strategy often fails to become part of everyday work.

The challenge, then, is not creating the strategy itself. It is turning strategic goals and initiatives into everyday actions. What does the strategy actually mean for a customer service representative, a production operator, a manager, or a specialist at the exact moment they need to make a decision in their own work?

We explored this topic during a customer fireside chat at Seppo Name Day, hosted by Seppo’s Head of Production and gamification specialist, Santeri Jaakkola. Joining him were Virpi Karhulahti, Head of Talent Acquisition at Outokumpu, and Hanna Saira, Communications Specialist at OmaSp (Oma Savings Bank). Although the two organizations approached strategy implementation from very different starting points, both had used a gamified learning experience to bring their strategy into everyday work – and arrived at remarkably similar conclusions.

Two Different Organizations, Two Different Realities

Outokumpu is a global stainless steel company with approximately 8,500 employees across more than 30 countries. Its workforce spans a wide range of roles, from production operators and technicians to specialists at the company’s headquarters in Helsinki. The challenge is making the strategy meaningful for all of them, across ten different languages.

OmaSp (Oma Savings Bank), on the other hand, is a 150-year-old Finnish bank serving around 200,000 customers through 48 branches across Finland. One of the bank’s distinguishing features is that both private and corporate customers work with the same contact person for all their banking needs. OmaSp employs around 600 people.

One is a global heavy industry company. The other is a Finnish bank known for its personal approach to customer service. Yet both leadership teams face the same question: How do you ensure that strategy doesn’t remain a leadership document, but becomes part of the decisions and actions people make every day?

Pilot Your Strategy Like Any Other Change Initiative

One of the biggest lessons from Outokumpu’s experience extends far beyond this particular strategy game: don’t develop your strategy behind closed doors and assume you’ve got it right the first time.

The game, built around the story of a missing metal alloy, was piloted across several business units before its wider rollout. Based on participant feedback, the content was refined, the text simplified, and the activities adapted to better suit different audiences.

As Virpi Karhulahti put it:

“Testing is the key. You need to get the first version out as quickly as possible, pilot it, and then keep piloting.”

At Outokumpu, it was particularly important to test the game with production teams. Feedback from the factory floor helped identify what still needed to be clarified before launching it across the organization.

The same principle applies to strategy communication more broadly. When people have the opportunity to test ideas, discuss them, and provide feedback early in the process, the end result is easier to understand – and much easier to put into practice.

Strategy Must Be More Than a Leadership Document

A strategy is only successful when every employee understands what it means for their own work.

Hanna Saira summed it up perfectly:

“A strategy should be a guiding star, a playbook, a cheat sheet you can pick up whenever you’re deciding between different options.”

A strategy shouldn’t simply explain what the organization wants to achieve. It should help employees navigate the next real-life situation they face at work. Strategy is not a separate initiative or a one-time launch – it’s a compass that helps people make better decisions every day.

Why Does The Gamified Approach Work?

Many people associate gamification with points and competition. Yet our discussion revealed something far more important: a gamified approach brings people together around a shared challenge. It gets them talking. They explore different options, challenge each other’s thinking, and build a shared understanding. And that’s exactly what successful strategy execution requires.

As Hanna Saira explained: “In the game, everyone is actively involved. Everyone gets to do, think, and collaborate. It engages people in a completely different way. Our team already worked well together, but once we started playing, there was a completely different kind of energy. I don’t know what it was – but there was definitely some magic in it.”

The game creates a safe space to experiment, discuss ideas – and even compete. When people step outside their everyday work roles for a moment, they begin to think differently. New conversations emerge, fresh ideas surface, and insights are shared in ways that traditional PowerPoint presentations rarely achieve.

Initial Skepticism Quickly Faded

Both OmaSp and Outokumpu had the same concern before launching their strategy game: How would employees react to a gamified approach? Would people think it was childish?

According to Seppo’s gamification specialist, Santeri Jaakkola, it’s a concern he hears often – but one that repeatedly proves unfounded.

That was true for both organizations. In fact, participants asked for more time to discuss the topics together because the game sparked even more conversation than anyone had expected.

At OmaSp, the competitive spirit even came as a surprise. So many teams achieved full scores that the next version of the game will include additional ways for teams to differentiate themselves.

Ultimately, this points to something much bigger: people want to take part in understanding strategy. They don’t just want to hear about it – they want to discuss it, challenge it, and make sense of it together.

Strategy Needs to Reach the Front Line

At Outokumpu, the challenge was significant: How do you make a shared strategy meaningful for someone working the night shift at a steel mill as well as for a specialist at headquarters?

According to Virpi, one of the key objectives was to help employees understand how their own work affects the end customer. A production operator may never read the intranet or attend a strategy briefing, yet their work has a direct impact on the customer experience. Virpi illustrated this with a simple but powerful example:

“What someone does in Tornio today might still be visible on someone’s refrigerator door fifteen years from now.”

By connecting the strategy to real customer situations and examples drawn from different production sites, it became much more tangible and relatable. The message was simple but important: your work isn’t just about completing your shift – it’s about contributing to a shared goal.

Another interesting observation was that the gamified approach worked across very different cultures. According to Virpi, the response varied somewhat from country to country. Teams in Sweden and Mexico, for example, were especially enthusiastic, where open discussion seemed to be a natural part of the working culture. In Finland, feedback was more reserved – as Finns tend to be – but the outcome was exactly the same: the game sparked meaningful conversations wherever it was played.

Understanding Strategy Isn’t Enough

As both Hanna and Virpi pointed out, knowing the strategy and acting on it are two very different things.

An employee may be able to recite the key points of the strategy by heart, but what really matters is whether the strategy guides their decisions in everyday situations. That requires open dialogue, practical examples, and opportunities for people to explore different ways of responding together.

The experiences of both Outokumpu and OmaSp reflect a broader shift in how organizations approach strategy communication. Strategy is no longer seen as a one-time launch, but as an ongoing, participatory process.

According to Hanna, strategy work has become much more embedded in everyday life. Organizations are involving both managers and employees more actively, listening to feedback, and making strategy an ongoing part of everyday conversations.

Managers Play a Critical Role in Bringing Strategy to Life

Both Hanna and Virpi highlighted the same insight: strategy doesn’t become part of everyday work through top-down communication alone. It comes to life through people’s immediate managers.

Employees need someone close to them – someone they can ask questions, seek clarification from, and use as a sounding board for understanding what the strategy means in their own work. That’s why both organizations invested heavily in ensuring that managers had the confidence and the tools to have these conversations with their teams

Perhaps the most important insight from the discussion was remarkably simple: Strategy only starts to come alive when people talk about it.

When teams ask questions like “What does this goal mean for us? How would we respond in this situation? Which option best supports our strategy?” strategy stops being an abstract document and becomes a shared way of making decisions.

Can Strategy Execution Be Measured in Ways Other Than Surveys?

The discussion concluded with a fascinating question. If you had a crystal ball, what would you really want to know about your people?

For Virpi, the most important question was whether strategy is actually reflected in people’s everyday decisions.

“When someone faces an everyday challenge or problem, how present is the strategy in their thinking? Do they actually look to it for answers?”

Hanna’s question was slightly different: “I’d like to understand whether teams have truly discussed these topics together and whether they’ve actually adopted new behaviours and ways of working.”

These questions capture a challenge that many organizations are still trying to solve.

Many companies evaluate strategy execution through employee surveys, participation rates, or business KPIs. Those metrics provide valuable insights, but they don’t always reveal how people actually behave when they’re required to apply the strategy under real-world pressure.

That question also formed the starting point for the second keynote at Seppo Name Day, where Anna-Mari Jääskeläinen, Product Lead at Seppo, introduced SeppoQ, our new solution for measuring organizational readiness.

Strategy Becomes Action Through People

Ultimately, strategy doesn’t live in presentations, intranets, or annual reports. It lives in the small decisions people make every day.

That’s why successful strategy execution isn’t just about communication. It’s a process of learning, participation, and ongoing dialogue.

When people understand why the strategy exists, what it means in their own work, and how it influences everyday choices, it gradually becomes a shared way of working. That’s when strategy can become a genuine competitive advantage.

Three Lessons for Bringing Strategy into Everyday Work

1. Strategy becomes action when people talk about it together. Communicating the strategy isn’t enough. People need opportunities to discuss it, question it, and make sense of it together.
2. Strategy has to reach the people doing the work. Everyone needs to understand how their own work contributes to the customer experience and the organization’s shared goals.
3. Pilot before you launch. Test your approach with a small group, gather feedback, refine it, and only then roll it out more broadly.

In this article, we’ve summarized the key insights from the customer fireside chat at Seppo Name Day 2026. You can watch the full discussion featuring Virpi Karhulahti (Outokumpu), Hanna Saira (OmaSp), and Santeri Jaakkola (Seppo) in the video below, from 04:13 to 33:00.