OP Janakkala at Kiipula: a day with an Olympic athlete

With grey October clouds hanging low in the treetops and rain on the horizon, it's time to lighten the mood and join cooperative bank OP Janakkala’s team and Olympic skiing champion Sami Jauhojärvi at Kiipula, under the expert guidance of Wellbeing Superstars.

OP Janakkala serves more than 21,000 customers online, and in Turenki and Tervakoski. Altogether, OP Janakkala’s customers’ interests are looked after by a team of more than 40 finance professionals. The bank’s most important values are friendliness, accountability and shared success, and these were amply reflected at OP Janakkala’s team away day at Kiipula in October 2023.

Kiipula Training and Rehabilitation Centre offers a great setting for active meetings and relaxed wellbeing days, where motivating expert lectures and fun outdoors activities are provided by Kiipula's partners such as Wellbeing Superstars.

On a grey October day, the OP Janakkala’s team gathered at Kiipula for a team away day – but as far as the day went, only the weather was grey.

World-class skier Sami Jauhojärvi's lecture on capacity management and physical fitness challenged participants to think about their own limits and capacity management. Olympic champion Jauhojärvi, more than most, knows how to create capacity in the middle of a busy work and home life, and how important teamwork is in optimising capacity and improving physical fitness as part of holistic development.

Enthusiastic teamwork was the name of the game, with the team grouping up and setting off into the woods to carry out innovative product development. Creative ideas for repurposing spikeless combs resulting from an accident at the comb factory and brought a smile to the faces of both the playful competition’s participants and the judges, Sami Jauhojärvi and Wellbeing Superstars’ Antti Luukkanen.

In addition to a pie slicer, a sowing implement, a love-o-meter, and Halloween-themed eyebrows, the spikeless comb was innovated into a hook for the copy machine, and introduced into use the very next day at the office for sorting out paper jams. But it was Team Red Robin who won the race, with the development of a universal tool for every job, associated with a crowdsourced app that makes solutions accessible to all.

This is a good place for the team to continue their work together, for the benefit of OP Janakkala’s customers!