A3. Project: Executive Summary
75E12000
Corporate Communication Practices
Outi Kreus, Miikka Jokela, Mirka Vesala, Nhi Tran Thao
Challenging Times at Rovio – Communicating Bad News
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This executive summary presents our consulting team’s core findings on the communication during
the layoffs of more than 300 employees at Rovio in 2014 and 2015. Having analyzed Rovio’s
success in the cooperation negotiations, we recognized that Rovio carried out their internal
communication during both processes well. However, something that could have been done even
better is going to be reviewed as follow.
Analysis of the situation
We gathered primary data from Rovio workforce, including interviews with Mr. Mikko Huttunen
(Senior Vice President HR) and Ms. Susanna Aittokoski (Internal Communications Manager).
Then, we also interviewed other current and former employees anonymously and collected
secondary data from the company website, press releases, news and social media and then
adapted communication guidelines to analyze that data. It could be concluded that the company
was suffering from growth problems and the bad news was actually partly expected. This
continuous change and uncertainty was so stressful to the employees that they then gave
interviews with negative tone to the press.
The extensive press coverage was due to the fact that after Nokia, Rovio and Angry Birds were the
first global breakthrough from Finland to gain large-scale international awareness. Finland and
Finnish people placed huge expectations on the company and when the growth didn’t materialize
as planned and Rovio was forced to lay off over 300 employees, the managing of media relations
proved to be very difficult.
Recommendations
The data gathered and analyzed lead us to proposing three main recommendation regarding
Rovio’s communication which will in the future help Rovio to communicate bad news more
effectively, especially externally. In our opinion, Rovio should
1. Improve its external communication to share the company atmosphere and culture even
during tough times
2. Alleviate employees’ stress by a) improving its change communication, b) encouraging
transparency, and c) making the current employees feel secure
3. Better highlight the numerous other actions they took to cut costs to minimize the need to
lay off people and communicate these clearly to the media
Conclusion
To sum up, it is vital to highlight once again that Rovio communicated the bad news on both
occasions extremely well. Based on the interviews, these layoffs were the first ones for most
communications professionals in the company and many more things could have gone worse. For
future reference, we hope Rovio considers the recommendations we mentioned above and keeps
up the excellent work in the future as well.