Confidence Over Correctness: How Technopolis Is Preparing Its Team for a More International Customer Base
The shared workspace expert Technopolis operates flexible business campuses across Finland, leasing office space to more than a thousand companies. Increasingly, those companies don't do business primarily in Finnish. As Technopolis's customer base becomes even more international, with multinational companies and internationally staffed teams making up a growing share of who walks through the door, the people managing the day-to-day customer relationship have had to adapt.
That's the job of Katja Valtonen and her team in Tampere. As a Service Manager who has worked at Technopolis for over fifteen years, Katja leads a group responsible for everything that happens after a lease is signed: onboarding new customers, managing accounts, staffing reception, and handling the countless small interactions that shape how a customer experiences the campus day to day. Her team isn't involved in negotiating leases, but they're the ones customers actually talk to, week after week.
Why now
The shift Katja describes reflects a broader national trend. Finland's foreign-language-speaking population passed 610,000 in 2024 (10.8% of the total population) after growing by nearly 52,000 people in a single year, one of the country's fastest-growing population segments.¹ According to the monitoring of Invest in Finland, which operates as part of Business Finland, 527 investment projects of foreign companies were located in Finland in 2025, which is 160 more than in the previous year. These investment projects include new foreign companies established in Finland and further investments made by foreign-owned companies already operating in Finland.² The major activity is concentrated in the Helsinki region, but also reaching business hubs like Tampere, where Technopolis operates on three campuses: Yliopistonrinne, Asemakeskus and Hermia. A 2025 study backed by the City of Helsinki found that international recruitment has become essential for many Finnish SMEs facing labour shortages, across industries from IT and healthcare to construction and hospitality.³
Throughout Technopolis' more than 40-year history, the company's customer base has consisted of both domestic and international companies. Now, as the broader national trend of increasing foreign investment in Finland continues, Technopolis is also seeing a growing share of companies leasing its spaces, and the people working within them, communicate primarily in English rather than Finnish. Day-to-day English competence on the service team has gone from a nice-to-have to something worth actively investing in.
The challenge: beyond small talk
When Katja and Technopolis began looking at English training, there wasn't one specific incident driving the decision. It was a general sense that the team needed more confidence operating in English, not for presentations or formal meetings, but for the everyday, unscripted moments that actually make up the job: a reception conversation, a maintenance issue explained on the spot, a routine account check-in that turns into something more complicated than expected.
Tailored, not off-the-shelf
IWG Institute worked with Technopolis to build a course around that reality, rather than a generic language class, consistent with how IWG approaches every client relationship: understanding what a team's day-to-day English actually looks like, and designing the course around it. Technopolis's team noted that flexibility throughout the process.
What changed
Before the course started, Katja and her colleagues felt a mix of enthusiasm and mild apprehension: it had been a long time since most of them had taken formal English lessons. That apprehension didn't last. Katja describes the course as very good, and points to something she didn't expect going in: participants, most of whom are Finnish speakers, started speaking English with each other during the course, something that hadn't happened before. Confidence, she noticed, rose quickly.
That distinction matters to Katja. In her view, grammar and other technical details of the language aren't really the point; what matters is speaking with confidence. It's a shift she describes as behavioral more than technical: not that people suddenly got the grammar 100% right, but that they became willing to have the conversation in the first place.
"Confidence matters more than correctness. Once our team felt comfortable just starting the conversation in English, everything else followed."
— Katja Valtonen, Service Manager, Technopolis, Tampere
The impact
Asked how Technopolis might measure the training's longer-term impact, Katja comes back to overall customer satisfaction: how confidently and smoothly the team can communicate with and serve customers, day to day. There's no hard before-and-after number, but overall customer satisfaction she'd point to as the one that matters most.
Looking ahead
As Technopolis's customer base keeps getting more international, the moments that shape a customer's experience, the unscripted, everyday ones, will keep happening more often in English. For Katja's team, the goal was never flawless English. It was the confidence to engage in the first place.
About IWG Institute
Find out how IWG Institute works with different industries: iwginstitute.com
Maria Kunz, Director of Studies · maria.kunz@iwginstituutti.fi · +358 40 5877 142
Sources
- Statistics Finland, “Number of foreign-language speakers exceeded 600,000 during 2024,” stat.fi.
- Business Finland / Invest in Finland, “Foreign investment increased in Finland in 2025,” 2026.
- City of Helsinki, PIKEUS project report on SMEs and foreign workers, 2025.