Palkitsijat – a podcast about rewarding
How do you make rewarding work, so that it is fair, understandable and genuinely effective?
Palkitsijat is an independent, research-based podcast for anyone who is on the receiving end of rewards, or who plans, develops and implements rewarding in the workplace. Understanding rewarding is an important working-life skill, and this podcast series is designed to help you build it.
Hosts Minna Nylander and Anu Hakonen talk with researchers and industry experts about what is happening in rewarding and how things have changed over the past decade. The 15 episodes of the season cover topics such as strategic rewarding, the history of pay systems, collective agreements, the Pay Transparency Directive, fairness, motivation and artificial intelligence.
A new episode every week. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.
Episodes
Impactful rewarding
What is rewarding really about?
Pay concerns everyone who works, yet we rarely stop to think about everything rewarding involves, or why it so often goes wrong in workplaces.
In the opening episode of the series, Minna Nylander and Anu Hakonen lay the foundation. What does the whole of rewarding include beyond monetary pay: benefits, non-financial rewards, opportunities for development? Why is a secure base salary a prerequisite for everything else to work? And why do the effects ultimately arise from people's interpretations rather than from the structure of the system?
That is exactly why the goal is not perfect rewarding but good enough rewarding: the kind that causes no harm and even brings a little bit of joy.
The episode also features two stories about what rewarding feels like when it hits the mark, and when it doesn't.
The series is based on the book Palkitseminen ihmisten johtamisessa ("Rewarding in People Management") and Aalto University's research programme on rewarding. The podcast's production has been funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund.
Strategic rewarding
When does rewarding become truly strategic?
Many organisations invest heavily in developing their strategy, but rewarding may be left somewhat on the sidelines. Yet it is precisely rewarding that tells people what is truly valued at work.
The guest is Kiisa Hulkko-Nyman, who has researched performance-based pay and built reward systems for companies for over twenty years. The episode discusses how rewarding can make strategy visible, and why an outdated system can undermine the very thing it was meant to help succeed.
The key finding of Kiisa's doctoral dissertation runs through the conversation: the effectiveness of rewarding is explained not by the ingenuity of the system, but by people understanding it and experiencing it as fair. Understanding of pay matters more than technique.
It also leads to a practical rule of thumb on the number of metrics in a performance-pay system, and a reminder to management that an incentive system that feels routine to them can look completely different to someone who wasn't involved in building it. The episode also covers how risk-taking in rewarding has changed in recent years.
Pay Transparency Directive
What does the directive bring that is new?
The Pay Transparency Directive is often discussed in terms of reporting obligations and deadlines. The most essential change easily remains in their shadow.
The guests are Johanna Maaniemi and Sini Jämsén, who have done foundational work in Finland together on evaluating work of equal value. They shift the focus to what is truly new in the directive.
The obligation to pay equal pay for work of equal value is nothing new for us in Finland, but the requirement that pay has a structure and justification is.
Among other things, the episode unpacks what work of equal value means and why it has proved such a difficult question.
One piece of advice runs through the conversation: don't wait for the law. It doesn't create a new obligation, but makes visible whether the justifications are in order, and you can check that yourself right now.
The Everyday Life of a Reward Professional
Who dares to make rewarding truly their own?
Rewarding has become a profession of its own in Finland. That is good news: expertise has deepened, and workplaces know more about rewarding than ever. But something else has happened at the same time. Everyone benchmarks everything, and when solutions are measured against what the company next door is doing, building something of your own starts to require justification.
The guest is Roosa Kohvakka, who has looked at rewarding from three angles: as a researcher, as a consultant, and now from inside her employer. She asks her own profession directly what it has done to develop the field, and answers herself: too little.
The episode discusses why rewarding so rarely makes it onto boards' agendas, what responsible rewarding means when it is more than one metric in the executive remuneration scheme, and why the pay transparency discussion easily gets stuck on reporting requirements instead of how people are recruited and promoted.
Roosa also gives instructions on the surest way to fail at rewarding: plan staff rewards in the management team without putting yourself in the employees' position, and ask a consultant for advice but not line managers.
Collective Agreements: Who Decides Your Pay?
Who decides your pay rise?
Finland has around 160 generally binding collective agreements, and altogether there are estimated to be 400 to 600. They set minimum pay, supplements and allowances, and often also how much pay will rise next year. The municipal sector’s social and health care agreement alone covers 187,000 people, and there a half-percent increase means hundreds of millions of euros every year.
The guest is Niilo Hakonen, who knows this world exceptionally well. At one point he read through every collective agreement in force. They took up a metre and a half of his bookshelf and, in his own words, were not bestseller material. Niilo also talks about why collective agreements are written in such a hard-to-follow way, and the answer is not incompetence but caution. A new lawyer does not dare to word things more sensibly than before, because the role of interest representative weighs on them. “We can’t always wait for someone to retire before we can start reforming anything” – or, in the worst case, for someone from both sides of the table.
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Release date: 8.10.2026
The Art of Conversation: Lessons from the Mediation Table
Pay is present in almost every mediation, but only in a narrow sense. The discussion revolves around the size, timing and structure of the increases: the general increase, the local pot, the adjustment pot. The whole of rewarding is hardly discussed. Sajavaara describes a mediation in which the sector’s skills shortage was obvious and people kept leaving. When she asked for a list of what was wrong in the sector, it filled up with shift planning, being ordered about, and having to buy the coffee milk themselves. She did not get an answer to the question of where any of this is discussed.
This is where the central idea of the episode comes together: a small pay rise warms people for a moment, but it is how everyday work runs that decides whether someone stays. Sajavaara calls for the courage to reward in everyday life, with quick rewards, recognition and being noticed. Not everything has to cost a fortune, and not everything has to go through the bargaining table.
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Release date: 15.10.2026
Meet your hosts
Minna Nylander and Anu Hakonen
The Palkitsijat podcast is hosted by Minna Nylander and Anu Hakonen, whose shared passion for reward management began in Aalto University's research programme on rewarding. The programme's researchers jokingly called themselves "Palkitsijat" (roughly, "the Rewarders"), and that is where the podcast got its name.
Minna and Anu co-edited the book Palkitseminen ihmisten johtamisessa ("Rewarding in People Management"; PS-kustannus 2015, now Santalahti Kustannus). The book brought the research programme's findings and expertise together in one volume, and it is still the only Finnish-language foundational work covering the theory of reward management. Now, more than ten years later, Minna and Anu have invited the book's authors and other experts in the field to discuss what is happening in rewarding today and what has changed since the book was written.
Minna Nylander is the founder and CEO of Fairness & Friends, a reward management consultancy. Her work centres on developing fairness and equity in rewarding, and in the book she wrote about how rewarding is renewed in organisations.
Anu Hakonen holds a PhD in philosophy and is a Research Director at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. Her specialities are the effectiveness of rewarding and motivation, in particular the question of when rewarding actually motivates.
Together, Minna and Anu bring both the researcher's and the practitioner's perspective to the podcast's discussions. The goal of the podcast and all its episodes is, in the end, very simple: effective rewarding concerns everyone, and that is why it needs to be talked about!
The Finnish Work Environment Fund supporting expertise in rewarding
The Palkitsijat podcast has deep roots in the work of the Finnish Work Environment Fund. The Fund supported Aalto University's research programme on rewarding over the years through several research projects, grants and conference grants. The programme did pioneering work to develop expertise in rewarding in Finland.
The effective rewarding model that runs through the podcast as a common thread also originated in a project funded by the Fund, where the model was first outlined as a whole. The model later became the backbone of the book Palkitseminen ihmisten johtamisessa ("Rewarding in People Management", 2015), and the book's preface also acknowledges the Fund's contribution.
Now, ten years after the research programme ended, the Fund has also taken part in funding the Palkitsijat podcast. In this way, the knowledge created through research continues its journey to workplaces, free of charge and available to everyone to listen to.
Read more about the Finnish Work Environment Fund: www.tsr.fi
