Everyone at Wärtsilä shapes our culture through daily encounters: how we work, collaborate, and help one another. When people feel safe, respected, and valued, we strengthen team trust, wellbeing, and performance.

Fostering belonging means encouraging inclusive behaviours and language in daily interactions, building psychological safety within teams, and supporting wellbeing as a foundation for sustainable performance. When people feel they can be themselves and speak up, teams collaborate better and achieve more together.

Everyone at Wärtsilä needs a fair chance to grow, contribute, and succeed. We embed equity and equality into all people processes, policies and programmes. From hire to retire.

This means making decisions that are fair, transparent, and free from bias. By focusing on fairness and equal access to opportunities, we strengthen trust and create the conditions for long‑term growth – for individuals and for Wärtsilä as a whole.

Everyone at Wärtsilä is a leader: of themselves, their work, and their contacts. We expect all to set direction, empower others, and model inclusive behaviours. Through inclusive leadership we make D&I real every day.

We encourage leaders at all levels to live up to inclusive behaviours, build diverse and collaborative teams, and actively seek different perspectives to avoid groupthink. By embedding inclusion into how we develop others, we unlock the full potential of diverse teams and drive better outcomes.

The key leadership development programmes, Orchestrator, Accelerator, and Wärtsilä Leader, are essential for bringing the leadership behaviours to life, thereby supporting the leaders in acquiring the desired competences.

In 2024, a new interactive key leadership development programme ‘Driving High-Performance Culture Workshops’ was globally rolled out, the implementation continues in 2025-2026. The goal of the programme is to embed a performance-driven mindset across Wärtsilä by equipping Line Managers with the tools, mindset, and practices needed to lead with clarity, dialogue, and strategic alignment. In the workshops Line Managers learn more about Wärtsilä’s renewed Performance Management approach and its connection to The Wärtsilä Way. Through different exercises they get the opportunity to practice having impactful performance & development dialogues, to set performance and development goals linked to strategy, to give feedback, and all in all to get more confident in leading own team. Globally, 1494 out of 2606 (57%) Line Managers participated in the programme.

One of the expected long-term impacts of the programme ‘Driving High-Performance Culture Workshops’ is to achieve Wärtsilä’s new long-term sustainability target of 100% Individual Development Plan (IDP) coverage for the eligible population by 2027. This goal is critical for Wärtsilä’s Professional Growth approach. In 2025, the coverage percentage of the IDP was 82.1%, and through the ‘Driving High-Performance Culture Workshops’ programme, we believe it will increase greatly during the coming years. Thereto, the programme aims at reducing employee turnover and increasing internal career mobility. In 2025, the promotion rate at Wärtsilä was 7.7%, implying that employees can advance their careers and develop their competences internally. All in all, the programme is pivotal for Wärtsilä in achieving the strategic priority; ‘Developing high-performance teams that make a difference’.

In Wärtsilä’s employee engagement survey, the favourability score for the statement ‘I have good opportunities to learn and develop at this company’ is impressive. The score has steadily been improving, and from 2020 to 2024 it grew by 21.3 percentage points (pp). 80% of Wärtsilä employees say that they agree or strongly agree with the statement, this is 6.9 pp above the global external benchmark. Wärtsilä’s work on implementing a common leadership model gives tangible results.

Wärtsilä continues to build its coaching and mentoring capabilities to foster an open culture where growth and development are valued. Coaching and mentoring provide several benefits to the organisation, such as supporting people to unlock their potential, building relationships and collaboration between colleagues, enabling cross-functional transfer of knowledge, fostering leadership and professional growth, as well as expanding professional networks and communities of expertise within the organisation. 

Coaching has many touchpoints to the overall organisation’s development. It has been seen and is seen as an important underpinning leadership competence supporting the leadership model and strategy execution, but not only that. Coaching is crucial in the performance and talent management processes, where we require line managers to have meaningful coaching conversations about performance and development.

Wärtsilä follows the International Coaching Federation coaching competence requirements and practices, offers robust coaching competence development to internal coaches, leaders and line managers, and fosters a coaching community for over 50 internal coaches. Leadership coaching is offered for all employees, both with external and internal coaches. Coaching is also integral part of the key leadership programmes. Company follows the 70-20-10 learning principle, where 70% of learning is by doing, 20% by sharing (coaching & mentoring included here), and 10% by studying.

• The impact of the learning is monitored through feedback surveys. Wärtsilä Leader, foundational and modular leadership program, 844 Line Managers out of 2606 have taken this course successfully. Peer Coaching in triads is part of the program to practice coaching.
• Senior Leadership Programmes have been running for three years now. During the programmes, 236 participants have been coached on their 360 Leadership Feeback and development planning. In total, 286 senior executives have received coaching, mainly by external coaches.
• In addition, during the coaching training programmes, approximately 100 participants have been receiving coaching training and coaching each other, at the same time. 29 of these participants have taken the ACC certification path training.
• In addition, anyone can apply for an internal coach via an online application and currently, 155 coaching processes have been conducted since 2022.
• In 2025, Wärtsilä’s internal coach pool remained on a sizable level of almost 50 coaches and around 200 pairs have gone through the coaching process to date.
  

Since 2021, Wärtsilä has systematically built a mentoring culture through a series of strategic initiatives and programs encouraging Wärtsilians to start mentoring relationships, which are mentee-driven, with mentors offering their time, experience, and insights to help mentees explore new perspectives and strengthen their capabilities. This exchange is built on openness, appreciation, and confidentiality. The Wärtsilä Mentoring Playbook serves as a practical and motivational guide for both mentors and mentees. The Playbook democratizes access to mentoring by making it easier for employees to initiate and sustain mentoring relationships — both formal and informal.

In 2025, there were three formal mentoring programmes, with 158 mentor/mentee pairs. 21 mentees participated in the Catalyst group mentoring programme where Board of Management members act as mentors. Beyond formal structures, informal mentoring relationships are encouraged.

Networks, communities of practitioners, and cross-functional teams play an important role in building a learning organisation. Wärtsilä takes pride in the internally established networks of practitioners where people who have common expertise and goals come together to learn, solve problems, improve practices, and innovate. These communities are distinct from formal organizational structures and are often cross-functional, enabling knowledge flow across business lines and boundaries.

The Sustainable Technology Hub in the energy cluster of the Vaasa region, Finland is a true example of how Wärtsilä has been able to build a hub with a unique approach to collaboration and innovation, involving Wärtsilä experts, as well as customers, technology partners, academia, and the surrounding ecosystem.

There are several communities of practitioners at Wärtsilä. To mention a few, the Agile Community, with ~400 people, not only brings the agile practitioners together but also welcomes anyone who wants to learn more about the agile ways of working and initiate an agile transformation within own team or organisation. Agile is a development approach that helps teams deliver value to customers fast and continuously, as well as respond to change and succeed in an uncertain environment. Agile is not just a method or process, it is a mindset building a culture of continuous improvement.

In 2023, the Wärtsilä Continuous Improvement model was launched, it is built on values, principles, and methods that lead us to continuously improving how we serve our customers, meet their needs, and together create impactful results. The Continuous Improvement Sharing Network is an important element of the overall framework. The Sharing Network brings people together to learn about continuous improvement best practices and to share Wärtsilä’s own cases where we can see a direct impact on flow improvement and customer value creation. The sessions are arranged monthly and are open to all employees interested in learning more about continuous improvement in practice and tune in to reflect and share own experiences. Each session usually has ~200 participants.

Wärtsilä started its digitalisation journey many years ago. Today, our focus is on strengthening the foundation for digital technologies and data to accelerate digitalisation in line with our purpose: ‘Enabling sustainable societies through innovation in technology and services’.

The commitment to further enhance the digital, data, and AI capabilities in the Businesses and Group Functions is strong, several initiatives across Wärtsilä showcase the importance of supporting employees to adapt to new digital tools, processes, and technologies within the workplace.

The AI Adoption Program is part of Wärtsilä’s broader digital transformation strategy. The program aims at building both foundational and advanced skills in AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is crucial to democratize knowledge on AI and its application. This is done by providing hands-on learning opportunities to grow AI fluency and enhance the overall digital competences within Wärtsilä.

The AI Champions Network and Hackathons foster a culture of innovation. The AI Champions Network consists of a group of selected employees acting as internal ambassadors to accelerate AI adoption, drive innovation and efficiency, as well as support colleagues in applying AI to their own projects and work.

Wärtsilä has for many years arranged hackathons. The hackathons are dynamic, cross-functional innovation events designed to tackle real-world challenges with creativity, collaboration, and cutting-edge technology. A prominent example of this, is the latest GenAI Hackathon that drew over 130 submissions. Seven teams were selected to brainstorm and elaborate on their ideas in the finale, and after a rigorous evaluation process, pitch for the win.

At Wärtsilä there is a wide learning offering on digital, data, AI, analytics, cyber security, data protection and privacy. The common aim for these is to build digital competences across Wärtsilä to increase efficiency, productivity, and support Wärtsilians on our digitalisation journey.

In 2025, Wärtsilä employees attended a total of 19.8 formal learning hours per employee. The average amount spent on formal training and development per employee headcount was EUR 502. However, it is important to recognise that a large part of learning takes place during the everyday flow of work, and not in formal training. Wärtsilä prides itself on offering numerous opportunities for its people to learn and develop in accordance with the 70-20-10 learning principle. Most learning takes place outside the classroom and cannot, therefore, be measured in terms of conventional training hours or learning days.

As the programmes and activities described above have been created and are being run as a part of many employees’ working time, it is not possible to state their exact costs. The trainings and programmes available, also cover contractual or part time employees in Wärtsilä’s own workforce.

In the table below further learning data is found.