ELIS. Relational Hubs
Designed as part of the ELIS Smart Alliance project, the Relational Hubs are shared workspaces where professionals working for a number of large Italian companies have the opportunity to experiment with new ways of working.
Challenge
How can we transform a work space into a place for relationships and well-being where, through contamination, co-design and knowledge exchange, we can stimulate people’s creativity and generate positive social impact on the territory?
Strategy
New ways of inhabiting work spaces require the sharing of new rituals.
A ritual is an experience out of the ordinary, repeated and repeatable, endowed with deep meaning for those who participate. Well-designed rituals are able to open new horizons of meaning and consolidate new modes of interaction between people.
With the future inhabitants of the relational gyms we have thus activated a co-design process in which we imagine rituals for the new spaces and share needs and desires connected to the new working scenario.
Process
In designing the new rituals, we started from the direct involvement of those who will inhabit the spaces of the Relational Hubs. With them we identified, during the first alignment phase, the three themes to work on: well-being and productivity, creativity, social impact.
Fundamental to this was the involvement of the ELIS Community Managers, trained thanks to a course designed by Shifton. They were given the practical task of activating the rituals within the Relational Hubs.
The subsequent co-design phase, on the other hand, made it possible to map the needs, desires and criticalities expressed by the ‘pioneers’ of the hubs. The co-design workshops, facilitated by the Shifton team, led to the elaboration of a total of 21 rituals, five of which were collectively selected to be put into practice during the start-up phase of the Relational Hubs.
In the final phase of Sensemaking, we collected and shared tools, methods and rituals, thanks to which the companies involved will be able to valorise the hidden talents of their people, in a strategic document that provides guidelines for the start-up of the experimentation.
The ELIS Smart Alliance project involves 31 companies from the telecommunications, energy, transport, finance and food sectors. The Relational Gyms are active in 5 cities: Milan, Rome, Naples, Trapani, Catania.
The Relational Hub becomes an opportunity for contamination between different professional and personal backgrounds, facilitating interaction, the creation of synergies, inter-company and inter-generational dialogue. For the companies involved, enhancing the quality of relationships between people means improving a series of important indicators, on which the challenges of the future of the world of work are played out: employee retention rate, productivity, quality, employee engagement level. The future of work is already here, and we have started to design it.
Credits
Client
ELIS Smart Alliance