– And why we believe so much in them –
Values: such an overrated word in the company world, you may think.
Everyone talks about values, every large company has a set of core values they act upon – or they say they do.
They have a special place in the website, maybe on the company brochure…but if you ask someone what those values are, why they are there, often they can’t even answer properly.
Today it almost looks like writing those values is more valuable than acting upon them.
But is it? Or maybe those values should descend from actions, instead of the contrary?
Maybe finding, defining and writing down those values should be a collective process, an informative quest, an analysis of what we already have and what we are leaning towards.
This, we decided, was going to be our approach. Because we didn’t feel the need for another page in our website, nor we wanted to impress someone on the outside with our company culture.
We don’t believe to be better just because we have them, but we do believe that having them is how we become the best version of ourselves.
What we wanted to do was to build a compass
We wanted to have at our disposal a compass which would always point to our North – the direction based on which we would choose ours.
A compass doesn’t show you the way you have to follow: it shows you where something valuable and stable is, something you can count on to always be there.
With this kind of tool, whatever direction you choose, you can always turn around and remember:
- where you started from;
- where a solid and immutable point is;
- if the direction you are going to is still the same you chose at the beginning.
Our North needed to be our Values.
From our Mission to our Values
We have already spent a lot of time and energy defining important cornerstones such as our Mission and our Vision.
Again, company keywords that in today’s world sound a bit overrated, but in our case were the result of a long journey of change: they brought us from being born as a family company to becoming part of an international and thriving group, without ever losing our strong culture and precious autonomy.
It all starts with our Vision, that is to put the Human Being at the center of the fully automatized and robotized world of the future.
Which translates into our Mission: contributing to it, providing the best interaction conditions between man and machine with technology, style and ergonomics.
They are clear stepping stones, the basis from which we set sail – let’s say, our safe harbor.
But what about the direction? How do we know that every decision, every turn, every new port we reach is contributing to our Mission?
To find this answer we needed to build the compass that would always point to what we want to become, to the best version of ourselves: our Values.
Our Charter of Values
The process of finding, defining, writing and reviewing our Core Values was an experience in itself: nothing is more demanding than stripping off everything that is superfluous, redundant or just not good enough about yourself as a person.
The same goes with companies.
We have tried to synthesize the values that guide us and have guided us in building this organization; they represent the explicit synthesis of our Culture, something very clear but very theoretical. These values are its actualization.
Clearly they are not perfect, of course we may fall or lose our route for a while. It is true that even the effort to make them explicit is just an approximation…but we have tried.
And with what we have now, we know not only our starting point but also where something good, immutable and greater than ourselves is, all the time.
With these two coordinates we can choose our direction wisely, and monitor it all the time. And everyone, inside and outside the company, can do the same.
So please allow us to bring you on a new journey among these pages: you will discover, month after month, the details of our Values, why we chose them and why we want them to guide us.
Are you ready?
See you next time,
Ilaria Cazziol