"Helsinki’s awesome new Central Library Oodi opened in December 2018, located in a custom-built, architectural-award-winning building right in the heart of Helsinki.

"Expectations were high for this high-profile project, and we were expecting up to 10,000 visitors a day. Oodi doesn’t just lend books: one of the first things we did, long before we opened our doors to the public, was to create our own, ambitious evolutionary purpose: to bring more equality to the world and to increase citizen involvement in society. Our EP helps us make decisions and focus on the essential.

"We knew that in order to succeed, we’d need to work differently from how libraries usually work in the Finnish public sector. We’d need to eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks to ensure that we’d be able to give our all at the customer interface. We decided that our teams would have to be self-managing, and we chose a way of working based on Teal.

"Even though we feel that the way we do things feels like the right way for us, it’s always great to get outside confirmation to confirm your beliefs. Tampere University asked Oodi to take part in a study into occupational wellbeing in self-managed organizations. Not many public organizations are self-managing, and Oodi was the only one of the five organizations participating in the study that was from the public sector.

"The study showed a correlation between self-management and wellbeing at work. The flow of work is often used in Finland as an indication of occupational well-being. The study indicated that this flow is a lot higher than average in self-managed work environments, and Oodi had the best flow of work of all the workplaces in the study."

Article: Research Shows That Self-Managing Organizations Have Better Occupational Well-Being