Our people

At Nokia, we care about our people. We aim to hire and retain the best talent and provide a work environment where each person can thrive. Our culture is guided by our essentials. It is through our people and culture that we create technology that helps the world act together. 

Our culture is key to why our customers and partners choose to work with us. Integrity and trust are fundamental ingredients of how we work and what we provide as trusted partners. We work relentlessly to earn and sustain the long-term relationships we have with our customers and partners.   

During 2023, we continued to run a monthly pulsing across Nokia business groups and functions. The core questions focused on the Nokia essentials, asking whether employees felt they could speak openly, challenge the status quo, and feel empowered to overcome any challenge. The aim was to determine how well open, fearless and empowered behaviors were present in Nokia. 

At the end of 2023, 81% of respondents agreed they could speak openly, 77% of respondents perceive that they can challenge the status quo, and 70% felt empowered to overcome challenges.  

1
Talent and performance management, which covers regular dialog, guided discussion, recognition and feedback as well as career aspirations, among other activities.

Nokia people managers are encouraged to hold quarterly discussions with their employees, which we call “1 in 90 Dialogs” and which focus on five key areas: goals, feedback, well-being, development and coaching. In 2023, employees and people managers were encouraged to focus on feedback (giving and receiving), well-being topics (work/life balance, mental health, available support) and resources available to report ethics and compliance concerns fostering a speak-up culture. 

Annual development reviews are available to all employees. We encourage managers to recognize performance, celebrate achievement and discuss career aspirations, as well as plan for the employee’s development in the coming year. 

2
Future talent growth, which includes business group talent initiatives (covering specific skills development and special assignments), executive succession and CEO advisory.

We provide growth opportunities that allow targeted development at the company level and business group level focusing on critical skills, stretch assignments and exposure. Business groups and functions have unit/function-specific initiatives in place to address their strategic talent needs. On a global level, future talent growth contains two main elements: executive succession planning and contributing to the CEO Advisory Board. 

In 2023 our Technical Career Path program introduced extensive mentor and coach directories for our talents to leverage in their career planning and progression. We also launched two new, future-critical roles (Security Specialist and IPR Portfolio Manager (Patent Attorney), and elevated AI-driven, personalized employee growth features and capabilities.

2
Competence development, which includes leadership development and assessment, and business critical and technical competence development and related learning offerings.

Our competence development activities focus on leadership, business-critical and technical skills for current and future needs. We offer learning solutions to our customers, partners and employees. In 2024 we recorded a total of 4 million learning hours for our employees consisting of 2.1 million training hours and 1.9 million sharing hours. The average number of all training hours was 45 hours per employee, an increase of 12% compared to 2023. 

Our customers and employees require new and diverse skills and competencies to thrive in today’s environment. To address these needs, we offer a full spectrum of technical training both internally and externally via multiple delivery methods including web-based, instructor-led, virtual instructor-led and blended learning. Our industry-recognized certification programs, including the Nokia Bell Labs 5G Certification, are targeted at building technical expertise and improving professional standing.

As part of our ESG enablement we have launched an ESG Community of Interest that provides regular training sessions, best practice sharing and awareness building to key regional and business group representatives.

All Nokia business groups and functions have their own I&D agendas, ensuring Nokia is advancing I&D. We have set our ambitions for the next three years focusing on three specific areas: 

• Diversifying Nokia’s talent pool. We re-established our female hiring target in March 2023, aspiring to a minimum of 27% female hires in global external recruits by the end of 2023. We achieved 28% of women in external hiring including the conversion of female trainees into permanent employees.  
• Creating a culture of high inclusion. We achieve this by logging year-on-year improvements in employee inclusion experiences in business groups and functions, based on the annual employee survey results. 
• Being the preferred choice for customers and investors by role modeling best I&D practices. The aim here is to score above the industry average in external benchmarks that are visible and accessible for our customers and investors, and to continuously improve on their feedback.  

In line with our essentials and in the spirit of openness, we publish and update the Nokia I&D Dashboard on a quarterly basis, which provides transparent insights into key demographics such as age groups, years of service, job grade, work location and gender. 

We want to show that we value people's working preferences.

In 2023, women accounted for 23% of our workforce and 17% of our leadership positions were held by women. On our Board of Directors, 50% of the members were women.  

The diversity of our Board is considered from a variety of angles, including but not limited to skills and experience, tenure, age, nationality, ethnicity, cultural and educational backgrounds, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other individual qualities. We aim to have at least 40% of Director positions held by members of the underrepresented genders on each Nokia Board composition. 

Since 2021 Nokia has been collaborating with UN Women. Through our collaboration, we’ve harnessed the power of technology to improve lives and increase gender equality. Now, we’re renewing our partnership and scaling up our ambitions so we can act together in more countries across five different regions to benefit more people. More than 100 Nokia volunteers have already taken part in community projects, in the Middle East and Africa, giving their time to mentor, coach and teach women and girls. 

The partnership’s focus is on leveraging digital solutions and private sector networks to (a) strengthen the capacities of vulnerable women to enhance their employability, entrepreneurship and agency in the online sphere; and (b) foster women’s participation and leadership in the tech sector. While Phase one of the partnership was focused on pilots in the Middle East and Africa, Phase two of this global partnership (2024), spans eight countries: Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Argentina, South Africa, India and the Philippines. One of its core focus areas is the work under the Action for employment and entrepreneurship stream, which has been tailored to country contexts and development priorities. For example, in Saudi Arabia, UN Women supports Nokia’s internship program to recruit women tech graduates. Under the Action for Leadership stream, UN Women provides technical assistance to Nokia’s talent initiatives with some of our customers to foster women’s leadership in those companies and develop business solutions to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 5 focusing on gender equality.

Nokia has worked with UN Women over the past two years to empower women and girls across the world

In South Africa, we are committed to good governance practices, transparency and compliance with all Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) codes of good practice. We promote Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programs and ensure alignment with our group diversity programs. Through our BEE plan we always commit to achieving specific BEE deliverables and actual target percentages for each deliverable. 

We want to score above the industry average in external benchmarks such as Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and Workplace Pride measuring LGBT+ inclusion the results of which we make visible for our customers and investors, these benchmarks provide us feedback for our continuous improvement. 

We want to exemplify the best inclusion and diversity practices and consistently benchmark ourselves against other players in the tech industry. Our target is to consistently improve our position in global benchmarks such as Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and Workplace Pride which measure LGBT+ inclusion.

Our key standards Working at Height, Rigging & Lifting, and Driving and Electrical are implemented with Non-Negotiable Requirements for effective controls to manage risk on a global scale in all markets. Incident management and reporting and investigation programs encourage all employees and contractors working on our behalf to report all incidents including near misses and high potential incidents.

Our assurance and governance programs have built-in checkpoints to measure effectiveness. We have agreed metrics and KPIs designed into all levels of our programs and business processes to assure and manage risk in critical areas such as supplier qualification and project management where high-risk activities are delivered. Country operational reviews and internal and external audits provide the visibility and accountability needed to improve performance and reduce risk. In addition, regular reporting, communication of recovery plans and action management are in place to ensure effective program management. 

We see the highest risk in the health and safety of our contractors who, for example, work at height, drive, or work with electricity. Therefore, we have set stringent KPIs related specifically to supplier health and safety Maturity Assessment and High-Risk Project Assessment qualification to ensure contractors are capable of delivering work safety on our behalf and projects have risk procedures and controls in place.