Full human potential

It all began with a birth

Not surprisingly, Life Based Value started with a life transition. It was 2012 and Riccarda Zezza was on her second maternity leave.

When she came back to work, she no longer had her managerial role. It made the return to work bitter, coming at a time when she was discovering new skills and keen to start new projects. Motherhood had unleashed a new energy for her, something that the company saw as a problem. But the time spent at home with her newborn had developed the same soft skills that the company was looking for in their staff, and even willing to pay big money for. Something wasn’t working, but what?

Riccarda started studying and learnt that her maternal intuition was clearly backed by science: the learning potential for new parents is incredibly high. This life phase allows you to quickly pass from a motherly to professional role, and vice versa, increasing life’s complexities and boosting energy without taking away a thing.

From leaving a job to a bestseller

The most human life events are the ones that help us learn and improve the soft skills that are in demand in the workplace.

It’s an exciting revelation that prompts Riccarda to hand in her notice and continue her research. It leads her to create a learning method that harnesses this power: Life Based Learning, based on the idea that we can learn from life.

In 2014 she talks about her research and corporate programs in a book written by Andrea Vitullo and published by Rizzoli. The book MAAM, maternity is a masters that makes women and men stronger is a bestseller having sold thousands of copies.

The workplace is ready, companies are ready

An increasing amount of companies want to share the program with their employees who have become parents.

Since 2015, the year that Life Based Value was born, thousands of parents have taken part in the programs.

At the same time, the Life Based Learning method travels around the world with its founder. It takes on an interesting twist as nothing similar exists in any country, but the work-life challenge is universal. Ashoka, the largest international network of innovative social entrepreneurs, certifies the social impact of Life Based Value to become EduTech Enterprise partner in the corporate world.

But in order to take the program abroad, the company needs more resources. People believe in the business, and in 2018 investors raise 1,500,000 euros for the company. It brings new employees, growing the team from 5 to 20.

From parenthood to valuing care

The high number of people that complete the Life Based Value training program confirms the validity of the original research.

The concept extends to include care values, where carers make up a part of the workforce that companies can no longer ignore. After two years of research, 2020 sees the birth of the program for carers. It’s designed to enrich the solutions available to companies who want to improve their competitive advantage by harnessing their employees’ life transitions.

From the crisis comes an opportunity

The pandemic has rewritten the lives of all of us but has also made listening more important than ever.

In 2020 we went through one of the most intense and challenging transitions ever. However, we have also understood that it is possible to transform a crisis phase into an opportunity for growth. Tuning in to listening transforms every transition – even breaking ones – into a training ground for professional effectiveness.

This is how the Transitions vertical and the Lifeed People Analytics team were born.

In 2021, Lifeed becomes the first and only Italian company amongst 16 disruptive and innovative fast-growing companies selected by the Unreasonable group, invited to join the Unreasonable future international program, created by Fossil Foundation, Pearson and Accenture to co-create the future of work.