ALESPublic Administration
Company culture, Internal engagement

Building a virtual place to strengthen company culture

From the innovation canvas to a platform that engages new hires and the wider workforce

Sector
Public Administration
Size
Large
Duration
Ongoing
The context

ALES operates in the culture and heritage sector, with services across Italy: museums, archaeological sites, libraries, archives, all the way to the Scuderie del Quirinale. Thousands of people working in places that are very different and far apart.

This distribution is the organisation’s strength and, at the same time, its greatest challenge when it comes to company culture.

The innovation need

When people are split across hundreds of sites, conveying who we are and how we work becomes difficult. The risk is that each person feels tied to their own site rather than to a single organisation.

ALES had already tried to bridge this distance with social media and an intranet, without achieving the engagement it hoped for. What was needed was a shared point of reference, capable of making every person feel part of the same story from day one.

The solution

The starting point was analysis: a brainstorming session with an interactive workshop to understand needs and requirements, the definition of a desired user flow, simple but effective, and research into the various technology solutions available on the market.

Once the requirements were clear, we adapted a blendX module used internally, turning it into a new standard product module. This is how Agorà was born: an onboarding and engagement platform built with ALES’s logic, brand and design system.

The journey is organised like a board game: you advance step by step, in a simple and engaging way, whether you are a new hire or someone completing training on a specific topic. As soon as each person logs in, they find their department and their manager, along with announcements published by the administration.

The platform brings several components together in a single space: step-by-step journeys for new hires and for reskilling on individual topics; curated content such as videos from the CEO, short video lessons and quizzes; a TO-DO section dedicated to the HR team, for requesting surveys, CV uploads and other information in a structured way; a points system with rewards, visible on each profile, that recognises completion of the journey; and a backend with dashboards and reporting, where HR monitors each person’s progress, writes directly from the platform and reads survey responses.

The method

Learn

  • Initial interactive workshop to map needs, objectives and the user flow
  • Research and benchmarking of onboarding and engagement platforms on the market
  • Analysis of geographic fragmentation and its effects on internal culture

Design

  • Adaptation of the Onboarding module to ALES’s requirements
  • Design of the journey as a board game, to make it intuitive and engaging
  • Structure of the HR TO-DO section and the monitoring backend

Execute

  • Delivery of the platform, the CEO videos and the short video lessons
  • Creation of quizzes, the points system and rewards tied to completing the journey
  • Gradual rollout, from pre-production to a pilot test with the first new hires, moving towards opening up to the entire workforce
The results
  • A single digital "place" where people across different sites recognise themselves in the brand
  • Positive feedback gathered in every presentation to the HR team, CEO and users, on a platform judged intuitive, simple and with well-crafted content
  • A more structured onboarding for new hires, with the platform link included among the first joining documents
  • A project that keeps growing: from the first users in pre-production to a progressive rollout across the whole organisation
blendX

Do you have a distributed organisation and want to strengthen its shared culture?

Tell us about your context: let’s build the first step together.

Book a demo