From ‘Future Makers’ to Hyper Teams: How Everllence is Rebuilding Industrial Work from Within

This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:

• Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace

• Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution

• Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.

This transformation began not with a corporate strategy but with a question. In 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company issued a simple invitation: Are you ready to be a Future Maker? There was no brief, noplan, and no KPIs. Twenty-five employees volunteered. What they started would challenge decades of industrial habit.

Everllence, formerly MAN Energy Solutions Zurich, is part of a global engineering group historically rooted in oil andgas. The Zurich site is a key hub for innovation, particularly in its shift toward sustainable technologies like industrial heat pumps. But by 2020, cultural and structural problems had come to a head. Employee engagement was low, silos persisted between departments, and frontline workers felt disconnected from decisions.

The most visible breakdown came in the Testbed department, where compressors are tested before delivery. According to Michele Cagna, Head of Supply Chain and responsible for the Testbed at the time, an employeesatisfaction survey that year showed “the worst results I had ever seen.” The team, comprising around 40 people, had become disillusioned with its leadership. It was a breaking point.

What followed was not a top-down overhaul. It began with two technicians: Camil, then 24, and Alex, aged 39. They drafted a bold proposal to redesign the Testbed as a self-managed team. They consulted colleagues, mapped out a new structure, and presented it to leadership. Their model eliminated traditional supervisory roles, redistributed responsibilities, and introduced collective decision-making.

The proposal faced resistance from existing managers who refused to cede authority. Eventually, they werereassigned or left the company. Michele chose to support the team’s plan, not because he believed it would succeed, but because the existing approach had already failed.

The result was a significant departure from traditional departmental management. The Testbed team began organising around roles rather than positions. Hiring decisions were made collectively. Performance reviews and salary recommendations were handled by peers. Access to systems like SAPwas extended to everyone, removing the gatekeeping power of managers.

The first few months were messy. But gradually, trust took root. Regular retrospectives helped the team adapt.Employees began owning tasks and raising problems proactively. One former technician, Heinz, chose to return to the company after seeing how the team had changed. “They called themselves self-organised,” he said. “If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be here today.”

While the Testbed was paving a new path, the original Future Makers continued working across the organisation. Their early experiments led to the creation of Go Transform, a peer-driven initiative launched in 2022 to challenge and redesign the deeper structures of the business. It introduced a new team model internally referred to as “hyper teams,” self-organising units with distributed decision-making and role-based work, developed incrementally rather thanimposed.

Although the company did not frame its transformation in terms of RenDanHeYi, the hyper team model introduced many characteristics aligned with RDHY’s principle of decentralised, P&L-responsible micro-entities. Teams began working with greater autonomy, coordinating laterally across functions,and defining their own operational rhythms through retrospectives and collective planning.

These teams were not told what to do. They chose their level of autonomy and experimented with governance, transparency, and peer coaching. This distributed approach reflected a bottom-up logic of change that resonates with RDHY’s concept of dynamic evolution, where new structures emerge from frontline experimentation rather than top-down design.

By 2023, entire departments began embracing these ideas. The Prime Serve division, which includes about 200 employees, underwent a complete redesign. The team moved from a single-manager structure to one in which operational, disciplinary, and technical leadership roles were separated and distributed. Employees could hold multiple roles depending on their interests and skills.

This shift further reflected RDHY's emphasis on separating administrative control from value contribution, enabling individuals to contribute flexibly across domains while maintaining collective accountability.

Not all parts of the business moved at the same speed. Some departments paused or adapted their approach. “Wewere quite dogmatic at the beginning,” Michele Cagna admitted. “Eventually we realised, leave it up to them. It’s not our decision.” This flexibility, now embedded in the transformation’s design, aligns with RDHY’s principle of context-driven decentralisation.

Even as change unfolded internally, external constraints remained. Everllence operates within a multinational group, and not all practices such as employee-led salary setting are legally viable in every country. In Zurich, however, the team continued to test boundaries. When a liquidity challenge delayed salaries during the post-COVID recovery, onehyper team proactively worked to collect outstanding receivables and ensured timely payments across the team. Noone asked them to. They saw the issue and responded as a business would.

Today, the Zurich site hosts more than 20 hyper teams. The Future Maker communities remain active, and GoTransform continues to provide a space for reflection and learning. Leaders from different areas coordinate across boundaries to share knowledge and support alignment.

The language inside Everllence has shifted. Teams no longer speak of approval but of ownership. Decisions are made where knowledge lives. The person on the shopfloor is not waiting for permission but proposing solutions. Employeesare no longer asking what they are allowed to do. They are asking what they are responsible for.

This is not a story of scaling a model. It is a story of evolving a system. From one team’s frustration, Everllence builtan internal movement rooted in self-management, transparency, and co-created value. What began as a small circle of Future Makers has become an organisation-wide shift in mindset.

And in doing so, this Swiss manufacturer has shown that even in the most traditional industries, work can be redesigned from the inside out.