Telia
How Telia Ran a Three-Day Leadership Programme for Six Countries — Virtually
When Telia's planned in-person leadership event had to go virtual two weeks out, they used Ventla to deliver a three-day programme for 120 leaders across six countries — without losing the dialogue.
The event was designed for a room. Three weeks before it started, there was no room. When COVID-19 forced Telia's three-day executive leadership programme to go fully virtual, 120 leaders from six countries needed an experience that preserved the dialogue and exchange of ideas the in-person format was built around.
The situation
Telia is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the Nordics and Baltics — around 21,000 employees across seven countries, with 4,700 in Sweden alone. Running that many people across that many markets requires continuous investment in the capabilities of its leadership team.
Each year, Telia holds more than 50 major meetings and events for its employees — conferences, training programmes, leadership offsites. One of the most important is its Executive Programme: a multi-day event bringing together senior leaders from across the organization to share strategic perspectives, workshop critical challenges, and build the cross-market relationships that make a distributed company actually function.
The 2020 edition was planned as an in-person event in Stockholm. 120 leaders from six countries. Three full days. A programme built around the kind of debate and exchange that's hard to replicate on a video call.
Then, weeks before the event, the decision was made: it was going virtual.
What they needed
The challenge wasn't just the technical question of how to stream a conference. It was how to preserve the things that made the event worth attending in the first place:
- Small-group workshops with genuine discussion, not passive viewing
- Dialogue and debate between participants across different countries and functions
- A single place where all information, formats, and interactions lived — not a patchwork of links, emails, and video platforms
- Seamless movement between different session types: plenary presentations, workshop groups, breakout rooms
- The ability to send reminders, polls, and surveys to 120 people simultaneously, in real time
How they used Ventla
Telia and their external event partner configured Ventla as the single hub for the entire programme. Every element of the three-day agenda lived in one place: streamed presentations, workshop materials, MS Teams links for breakout sessions, speaker biographies, and the programme information that participants needed to navigate their day.
The workshop structure was the most complex piece. Participants were divided into groups based on their product area and organizational context — each group accessing their specific breakout links through "My Information" in the app. Moving between plenary sessions and group workshops required no separate login, no link-hunting, no switching between systems.
Throughout the three days, the organizing team used push notifications to coordinate 120 people across six countries in real time — reminders about when sessions were starting, prompts to move between rooms, live polls to drive discussion in plenaries, and surveys to capture feedback while sessions were still fresh.
The platform worked on both mobile and desktop. Participants who wanted to follow along on a larger screen could. Those who preferred their phone could take the conference with them between sessions.
What happened
What struck the Telia team most was how the consolidation of everything into one platform changed the experience for participants. In a virtual event cobbled together from different tools, attendees spend cognitive energy navigating the toolset. When everything is in the same interface, they can focus on the content.
Participants specifically mentioned the value of having streamed presentations, MS Teams workshops, speaker bios, external resources, and communication tools all accessible in the same app. The flexibility — desktop for sessions, mobile for breaks and corridor conversations — replicated something of the physical conference experience that most virtual formats lose entirely.
The event ran across three full days without the operational friction that typically accompanies virtual events at this scale. Real-time push communications meant schedule adjustments reached everyone instantly, without the cascade of emails that usually follows a change.
What this means for similar organizations
Telia's situation in 2020 was acute, but the underlying challenge is permanent: large organizations need to run leadership development and strategic alignment events across distributed, multi-country teams, and physical gatherings aren't always possible or practical.
The lesson isn't that virtual is better than in-person — it often isn't, for this type of event. The lesson is that a well-configured platform can preserve the most important elements of an in-person programme: small-group dialogue, real-time interaction, and the sense that everyone is in the same place together, even when they're not.
For organizations running leadership programmes, offsites, or strategic alignment events across multiple countries or time zones, the platform choice significantly affects whether the programme delivers its intended value or just its scheduled hours.
Industry: Telecom · Event type: Virtual Leadership Conference · Attendees: 120 · Region: Nordics / Europe (6 countries)
Running a leadership programme or executive offsite across multiple countries or time zones? Talk to Ventla about what the platform looks like for distributed teams.
