Property and construction industry consulting company Granlund has grown from 700 employees to an organisation of over 1,800 experts in just a decade. Such significant growth has not happened by chance – behind it lies a deliberate choice to build a workplace where people thrive, develop, and feel well. The best workplace.
"Employee satisfaction is an important metric that we follow," says Granlund's HR Director Minna Lappalainen.
”Employee benefits, in turn, are a concrete way to support staff wellbeing and resilience."
At Granlund, employee benefits are communicated to new employees proactively. This means that, for example during a job interview, the direct manager brings up the benefits – it is not left to the applicant to ask. Granlund also outlines the benefits it offers on its website.
It is important to Granlund that every employee has access to their full benefits package from their very first day at work. Benefits are also extended to trainees.
"And many trainees have been pleasantly surprised when their full available balance has appeared in Epassi," says Granlund's HR Specialist Kirsi Toijonen, who is responsible for managing employee benefits.
The most widely used benefits among Granlund employees are the lunch benefit and the commuting benefit. The Flex benefit, in turn, is used extensively for sports, culture, and wellbeing services. The massage facility at the head office has also risen to a prominent position in usage statistics. A massage therapist visits the office twice a week – and payment can be handled with Epassi.
Granlund's experience is that employees are significantly more likely to use the massage service when the employer makes it available in the middle of a busy working day.
Since Granlund sells sustainable solutions to its clients, it wants the same value to be reflected in its own internal operations. The commuting benefit is a concrete sustainability action: using public transport is part of the company's sustainability work, and the benefit makes it easy for employees to choose a more sustainable way to commute.
"We want to make sure that our employee benefits are also sustainable," Toijonen concludes.
In an organisation of over 1,800 people, managing benefits manually would be practically impossible. Thanks to Epassi's automation, adding and removing employees is handled automatically without any manual input.
"It's a big deal in a company of this size. Managing benefits manually would require several people working full-time – and there would still be errors," says Toijonen.
Toijonen praises the collaboration with Epassi. Help is available when needed, and solutions can be found even for unexpected situations. "If everything works, there's no need to be in touch. That is actually the best possible situation."
Granlund employees use their benefits actively, and ultimately the value of employee benefits is measured in the everyday lives of the users – the employees themselves. Granlund's Team Manager Sanna Peltoniemi sums up her experience of using Epassi:
"The Epassi app is easy to use and you can quickly check your balances. The wide selection of locations and different employee benefits is useful, because it makes it easy to choose options that suit your own everyday life. For me, the sports benefit is the most important employee benefit, as it also encourages taking care of your own wellbeing."
What are the growth ambitions of your organisation? Could employee experience be the metric you use to track progress? Get in touch with your Epassi expert and let's talk about how Epassi's digital solutions improve the employee experience and support staff wellbeing in the middle of a busy working day.