Terhi Hasila

In her nearly 20 years at Lindström, Terhi Hasila has worked in various customer relations roles before starting her current position as Service Owner of Washroom Service.

I’ve worked with all sorts of Lindström customers across nearly all industries. This helps me in my current role because it gives me a deep understanding of how our business operates and how our customers see the world.

As a Service Owner, Terhi ensures her teammates have everything they need to excel in their work. “The washroom service cross functional development team is like a development engine and my job is to keep it running and to keep fueling people.” 

Terhi’s team also runs development work in an agile way. “Development is an iterative process; we ideate, try, evaluate, and then either fail or continue the development. The faster we fail, the better,” she says. 

Endless curiosity and agile development 

Terhi sees having endless curiosity and an open mind to be crucial for her role. No two days are the same, and she wouldn’t want it any other way.

“It’s important to be observant and pick up bits and pieces from wherever you go. It’s not just about the washroom service—it’s good to try to understand a variety of topics deeply. When you ask more questions and involve more people, the results can turn out very different from what you imagined, often ten times better than your original idea,” says Terhi. 

Based in Lappeenranta, a few hours from Lindström’s Helsinki headquarters, Terhi works primarily from home—with her three parrots as assistants. Outside of work, she sees travel as fuel for her curious mind. “Seeing different places and people, and understanding different ways of living also helps me be better at my job,” says Terhi. 

Forerunner in circular economy 

Terhi describes sustainability as part of the washroom service’s DNA. For instance, one of Lindström’s washroom products is the cotton towel roll—a sustainable alternative for hand drying in public washrooms. During its lifecycle, one cotton towel roll goes through some 100 washes and provides 11,000 instances of hand drying before being recycled without generating waste. “I don’t know how much more sustainable you can be,” says Terhi.

We’ve also integrated sustainability into our washroom service by repairing, maintaining, and refurbishing dispensers to further extend their life cycle. 

Plus, the smart dispenser technology alerts washroom caretakers when the cotton towel roll is nearly empty, and generates usage reports for optimised cleaning schedules.

Smart technology gives more transparency to the washroom, allowing our customers to see when there’s the most traffic. This helps them allocate cleaning resources and optimise the whole process, which also results in improved sustainability.

For Lindström’s first product-specific life cycle assessment, we studied the cotton towel roll’s entire environmental impact, including carbon footprint and water use, from the cotton field to the recycling phase.

Terhi Hasila embraces ecosystem collaboration 

Terhi’s team collaborates closely with customers and their facility management partners. Looking ahead, she emphasises the growing importance of ecosystems within companies. 

“We’re part of ecosystems in B2B companies, though we don’t always acknowledge them. But I think we should: No one can achieve sustainability or science-based targets alone. We all  have goals and we all need help to reach our goals. And what could be better than forming partnerships and creating ecosystems with our partners—both suppliers and customers— to achieve meaningful results?” says Terhi.

To fully embrace this ecosystem approach, Terhi Hasila stresses the need for transparency and collaborative innovation. “We aim to be a curious partner within our network, asking questions and challenging not only ourselves but all partners within the value chain,” she concludes.