Case: Hyria

Educational Institution in Transformation

With Agile Work, our company received and approved a work enviroment strategy in a month. Agile Work made history and worked very agile way same time challenging us.

Representative of Hyria

Services

Workshops

Needs assessments

Workplace strategy

Hyria is undergoing a big transformation with its real estates. Hyria is a multidisciplinary educational institution offering vocational education and training. 

​Its six main campuses are located in the Hyvinkää and Riihimäki region. Hyria commissioned us to help them with the development of their campus in Kauppalankatu 18 in Hyvinkää to become more flexible and respond to the changing requirements of today’s learning environments. 

Hyria wants to become the forerunner and modern actor in vocational education and was therefore looking for a partner that was able to challenge and rethink the current set-up.

From analysing the current situation to challenging and validating solutions for the future

It was quite quickly clear that the project was not only about the one campus in Hyvinkää, but that Hyria needed an overall workplace strategy and guidelines that they could follow in the overall development of all their campuses.

In addition, we interviewed the managers of the study programs at the Kauppalankatu campus in order to get an understanding of the different actors and activities, current ways of working, studying, and learning as well as the culture and atmosphere at the campus. Next, we organized 3 employee experience workshops – one with students, one with teachers, and one with other important personnel of the campus – to map their experience journeys, ways of working, and challenges encountered.

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Co-creative design

Based on the data and insights from the interviews, discussions, and observations we created altogether 6 different personas describing their life and activities at the campus and worked with these in the two design sprint workshops.

The workshop participants were different actors in the school: students, teachers, and people from student services. In the first workshop we worked on the current layout of the campus and mapped the challenges and pain points of working, studying, and being at the campus and started already to think about solutions: what functions need to be supported, what kind of different environments, zones and spatial types are needed.  Thereafter, we drafted the first concept for the workplace strategy with the most important guidelines for development and the first layout option and visualizations of the new campus.

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New workplace strategy in a month

Within six weeks’ time, we involved nearly 30 people in the process, carried out 9 interviews, had several discussions and checkpoint meetings with the management team and other personnel, did many observations, organized 3 employee experience workshops and 2 design sprint workshops.

With our participatory methods, we managed to collect the most relevant insights from Hyria, co-create together with Hyria’s people a new concept for the Hyvinkää campus, and created a workplace strategy for Hyria’s overall campus development. This means that Hyria can continue with the more precise planning of the Kauppalankatu campus within schedule and a clearer direction.

After this first phase, Hyria has decided to continue the collaboration with us. In the next phase, we will help Hyria to define more precisely the spatial program, that is defining characteristics, number, sizes, and requirements of the different spaces and spatial types, which are prerequisites for architectural planning. In addition, we will act as the close partner in the project planning and management of the campus transformation.

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