In 2019, SealteQ won the SME!dee, with the plan for a digital onboarding module for new colleagues and a real SealteQ Escape Room. It didn’t stop there. We also developed our own innovation team. Colleagues started working on current issues facing our company. What did that yield?

Innovation team: connecting with the outside world

As with many companies in the technology sector, finding personnel for SealteQ is a challenge. “The demand is greater than the supply and the sector is not popular with young people,” says Gerthé Klaassens, Director of Operations and initiator of SME!dee All in the Game.

“So hiring people is not easy. But binding and retaining them for SealteQ ultimately proved to be an even more important component. When we found new colleagues, some of them also left again.” The onboarding process with gamification – adding game elements – and completing the modules at their own pace proved to be a solution.

But that only solved part of the problem. Because how do you ensure a connection between your company and young people? The greater that connection, the greater the chance that they will ultimately choose training or a job at SealteQ. This automatically increases the supply of qualified personnel. We received help from Up to Us with that issue.

“The question we posed to Up to Us: how do we, as an organization, ensure that we are better connected to the young outside world and remain fresh and inquisitive?” says Klaassens. “Together, we came up with an innovation team. By learning to wear an inquisitive lens, we try to maintain that connection. What is there to learn from young people themselves, the labor market and from other companies?” This led to a number of innovative solutions.

Inquisitive glasses

”If you engage with an issue, we believe you should always do so with those around and about whom it concerns. That’s where solutions get better,” says Marloes Dekker of Up to Us. ,,That may sound like an open door, but it is still far from obvious everywhere.”

”We tried with the innovation team to strengthen the connection with the places where SealteQ finds workers. By engaging with young workers, for example, and with students.” What keeps today’s young people busy? And what does that mean for SealteQ? What do they find important in a job?

As a result, the innovation team came up with a number of solutions that SealteQ might not otherwise have found, says Gerthé Klaassens. “Precisely because of that inquisitive lens, we did not work from potentially old assumptions.” For example, we discovered why new employees sometimes left again in the short term. Members of the innovation team set to work on the causes of this, in order to limit or even prevent outflow in the future.

The innovation team is a new way of working

“Anyone who wants to develop innovations in a company needs, among other things, a certain attitude,” Dekker explains. “That you dare to experiment, you can adapt to circumstances and are therefore flexible. Suddenly you are doing something completely different from your daily work: you come up with an innovative solution and how you can implement it in the company.” And as an organization you have to give room for that, says Dekker. “That is really conditional. If you as a company do not create those conditions, you will not get any further with your inquisitive attitude.”

The method that Up to Us used for this is the VOORT method. “An innovation method where you as a team go through the steps to go from a good joint exploration of the issue to devising solutions. And then choose which of these solutions you are actually going to do,” says Dekker.

For SealteQ, the development of the innovation team was the beginning of a new way of working. One in which employees from all facets and locations of SealteQ as well as the potential target group are involved. This therefore leads to innovative solutions, because, among other things, we work together even more and we are better informed of the challenges at our various locations and the world around us.

The innovation process with Up to Us has now been completed. With great success, we might add. “The ambition is that there will be a SealteQ innovation team that will work on various issues,” says Klaassens. We are currently investigating how this will become a permanent part of our organization.