2. SPII’s Charter of Values – #Inclusion
People, women and men, can make the difference.
2020 is a year that draw a line.
It did so in many ways, for most of the people in the World, with a pandemic that changed our very way of living.
But it did so in a much different way for SPII.
In 2020, when the World started to move again at a normal speed and we had the time and energy to do it, we did some reflections.
We dug deep, deeper than ever, and down there we found our very core: the new Vision and Mission were born.
Do you choose your values, or your values choose you?
Until then we considered ourselves (and the rest of the World did) a rail-focused company. In 2020, we decided to raise our heads and look beyond what we did as a job, focusing instead on what our competence was.
Until then, within the 2015-2020 strategy, our goal was to become a competence center within Schaltbau. When in 2020 that cycle was over, we could concentrate on a new strategy.
Our website, our social media, our communication still represented the caterpillar we used to be, while we wanted to start talking about the butterfly we had long become without ever celebrating it.
We already told you of how “WhereverWeCan” was born, a powerful and effective synthesis of our path – the one we had walked until then, and the one we wanted to follow from there.
It became the first point of our Charter of Values, an effort to condense and write down all the principles and guidelines that in fact underlie our vision. They are the result of our dreams, our experiences and the many mistakes we have made and are making.
It was a difficult and introspective process the one that gave birth to the Chart. But we knew exactly what we wanted to be our second value…
Inclusion: let the facts speak
Inclusion has become such a buzzword, just like “biologic” or “smart“.
Those kind of terms that are so overused and misused that people stop believing in them. They sound like just another cliché, something a company needs to say to be up to date and compliant with everyone’s expectation.
Well, let them. We don’t need to say anything…we can just let the facts speak.
Today half of our production managers are women: they are young, educated, committed to the company but also to their families (some of them are also mothers), and they run departments full of men that are often older than them.
All in all, we have a rate of 40% women among SPII’s white collar workers…and we didn’t even know it until we run the numbers!
Is this inclusive enough for you?
The truth is we don’t need “pink quotas” of any sort here, because we actually don’t see any colors!
What makes the real difference?
I told you how we came to choose our values, or better said how they chose us, because we want you to know they are not buzzwords: they are who we are.
And during our victories and our (many) mistakes, we found out loud and clear a very universal truth:
When it comes to success, it doesn’t really matter what software you use, how big is your lab, how much money you spend in R&D, how much technology you show around, nor the models you use.
Do you want to know what makes the real difference? People.
People, women and men, regardless of any orientation, creed or background, always make the difference.
Not just who they are, but how engaged they are, how committed to the cause, how they feel heard and seen, and what contribution they make.
We were led to believe in these many years that whether an entrepreneurial activity is successful or not depends mostly on this, in the end.
So we learned the importance of having no bias: winning ideas can come from any source. You just need to sit silent and listen to any voice may come.
The more inclusive you are, the more diverse, interesting, complementary, innovative and true those voices will be.
This is how we decided that our second Value had to be this one:
#Inclusion
See you next time,
Ilaria Cazziol