Over 11% of the City of Helsinki’s employees speak a native language other than Finnish or Swedish, and this share will continue to grow.
The city is strengthening both the language skills of employees with foreign backgrounds and the ability of supervisors and teams to collaborate effectively in environments with varying language proficiency.
They partnered with Inklusiiv to design a training programme for work communities that had just welcomed their first colleagues who are non-native speakers.
Starting points
Welcoming first non-native language speakers
The City of Helsinki, employing thousands across its departments, launched a pilot in 2025 where several units welcomed their first employees who were non-native speakers of Finnish and Swedish.
The city wanted to ensure that both HR and teams were ready to:
- Welcome colleagues with varying proficiency of the local language.
- Make collaboration smoother across varying language levels.
- Increase awareness of how cultural diversity, language and norms shape everyday work.
This initiative was part of the city’s broader effort to respond to demographic shifts. With many native-language speakers retiring in the coming years, the city recognised the need to prepare for and welcome talent whose local language skills are still developing but sufficient for their roles — and to make sure everyone can contribute fully from day one.
Collaboration
HR embeds language and cultural diversity into leadership development
The Human Resources Development (HRD) unit, responsible for the city’s leadership development, wanted to equip leaders and their team with the knowledge and skills to:
- Understand the demographic changes shaping the city’s workforce.
- Strengthen awareness of cultural diversity, varying language proficiency, and their impact on leadership, teamwork, and workplaces.
- Integrate these perspectives into leadership development programmes and processes.
A 2.5-hour interactive training was co-created around knowledge building, their own processes, including realistic scenario exercises on communication, feedback, and psychological safety in multilingual teams.
Teams build skills for collaboration across different language levels
Two work communities took part in 2.5-hour trainings designed to make everyday collaboration smoother in environments with varying language levels.
Employees discussed how communication habits, cultural differences and workplace norms can either support or slow down teamwork.
Through realistic scenario exercises, they recognised how complex, sector-specific language can lead to misunderstandings, and learned practical ways to adapt communication and support psychological safety in teams with varying language levels.
Participants described the trainings as eye-opening. Using real situations from everyday work helped make language-related challenges visible. Over the course of the trainings, awareness grew around sector-specific language and the impact of everyday communication choices.
Outcomes
Increased readiness to welcome the future workforce
The training programmes strengthened both HR and team-level capabilities for effective collaboration.
HRD Unit now has an increased understanding and knowledge about impacts of cultural and language diversity and a chance to embed language and cultural diversity in leadership development and manager training.
Teams have increased understanding of how to welcome and better include new team members with different language level skills.
Alongside other broader city-wide measures, the trainings helped the City of Helsinki become better equipped to welcome non-native language speakers, strengthen teamwork, and respond to demographic changes shaping its future workforce.
After the trainings, feedback showed increased readiness to support workplaces with different language levels, deeper understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity, and clearer tools for building belonging in teams.
The collaboration was considered successful, and the work with Inklusiiv was described as flexible, smooth, and straightforward.
