The pandemic has accelerated the evolution of corporate organizational models. Organizations have changed in three ways: digitalization, sustainability and consumer power relating to company choices and actions. During this period of change, ‘new’ dimensions have come into the spotlight. Dimensions such as wellbeing, trust, collaboration, respect, diffused leadership and shared objectives. All of which follow the Olivetti business model.
In fact, it was Adriano Olivetti that believed that people’s lives should come onto the factory floor. “Today we’re still living with a paradox in the world of work. It sees people as being divided between their private and professional lives. But we have the opportunity to extend the corporate map. We can understand the lives of those within the business”, explained Riccarda Zezza Lifeed CEO at Organizations for people or people for organizations? an event for the 50th Aidp National Congress. At the event, she spoke with Isaac Getz, professor at ESCP Business School, expert on the global corporate liberation movement.
It shouldn’t feel so strange to talk about altruistic companies in the current age. But before remote working became the norm, people’s lives had been left out of the offices. “The complexity in our lives was already there before. But now, it is now much more visible”, highlighted Riccarda Zezza. “In the past, it seemed normal to have to ‘balance’ work and life. But looking after others is a part of our human nature. It’s a primal instinct for our race that reveals responsibilities. It makes us agents for change”.
‘Egoistic’ companies leave this concept at the picket line. But people’s resources are already very present within our companies. “To reframe the situation, we don’t need to add new forms from the top down. Rather we need to make space for people’s identity dimensions. By bringing life to work, we can build an altruistic economy and society”.
So, how can companies translate this into their practices today? According to Isaac Getz, altruistic companies have three main characteristics. “They care for all members of the business ecosystem. They work unconditionally throughout all of their processes and core business. That’s how we can grow our bottom lines”. With their ethical actions in relation to stakeholders, focusing on sustainability and human values, these businesses achieve positive results.
On the other hand, 87% of Millennials believe that business success can not be measured in revenue alone. 89% of consumers would be ready to stop buying from a brand in order to favour another with a key social focus.
Focusing on social value is key. “People, clients, suppliers, communities. The mix of all these ‘ingredients’ really adds the finishing touches to a business: financial results that emerge from a caring business ecosystem“.
According to Getz, managers and HR directors are called to change organizations. They need to abandon the idea of top-down leadership and leaving their egos at the door. Instead, it’s time to move towards an altruistic vision, with core business processes that offer social value for their clients, suppliers and communities. It’s all about improving the lives of those that ‘live’ in the ecosystem.
People often see caring for someone as detracting from their everyday work. Particularly when it comes to caring for elderly and dependent parents. Some companies even consider caregivers’ activities to be a ‘distraction’. Many believe that these activities have a direct impact on employee productivity.
But the opposite is true. Caregivers develop skills and attitudes (from empathy and problem solving to leadership) through caregiving activities. People can also apply those skills at work. This impacts positively on their productivity.
The number of informal caregivers is on the rise in the UK. Currently, around one in ten people are caregivers, contributing £119 million to the economy every year. What’s more, according to recent government research, 64% of people caring for parents are also in work.
“We all have complex lives. But when we leverage our life experiences, we can boost our capabilities and acquire new transferable skills that are often in demand in businesses today”, explains Riccarda Zezza, Lifeed CEO, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Avvenire.
It’s time for companies to start considering caregiving as an opportunity, rather than a problem. Workers have the opportunity to maximize their caregiving experiences at work, “developing their resilience, listening, empathy and leadership skills as well as a greater awareness of their resources”.
UniCredit has seen this double advantage for their employees and company. As part of their welfare initiatives, they have chosen to implement Lifeed Caregivers. Monica Carta, Head of Welfare at UniCredit, told Avvenire that the journey “gave good results in terms of new energy and skills made available by working caregivers”.
Lifeed programs have also been useful for Enel employees, with over 530 people taking part. It’s created opportunities for people to “reconcile their identities and manage the complexity that caregivers face”, says Raffaella Poggi D’Angelo, People Care and Diversity Manager at Enel.
What needs to fall into place so women can work? Something just isn’t working. As the BBC reports, the pay gap still exists, with women more likely to earn less below the living wage compared to their male counterparts. What’s more, The Economist publication hosts an annual Glass Ceiling Index across 29 developed economy nations – taking higher education, labour force, pay, caregiving and representation in senior roles into consideration. Northen Europe fares quite well, but Britain only ranks 20th out of 29. Italy doesn’t fare much better.
In Italy, women have had the right to vote and be elected in parliament since 1945. Another parameter that the World Economic Forum uses to measure gender equality is “the number of years that a country has had a female head of state”. In Italy, that number is ZERO. We’ve been voting for 75 years, but we’ve never had a female head of state. What does that have to do with anything? It can’t be a coincidence.
The Italian prime minister said that “to guarantee a level playing field between genders, we need to work on the pay gap and welfare“. It’s like we’re on a running track, at the starting line next to our male counterparts. Only where the men have a clear path ahead, the women have to jump over the hurdles in front of her – clothes to wash, part-time contracts, a slalom of prejudice. Is our end goal to really have “a level playing field“?
Are we trying to pave the way for women so they can run like men?
If that’s the case, it would be better to work on services available to lighten the load for women in those 315 minutes dedicated to “free domestic labour” each day (compared to 104 minutes spent by men). It would be a case of removing those extra obstacles to leave space on the track to use it as intended.
But what if we needed to change the track all together? If 50% of the country is struggling, is that not a sign that the system isn’t working for anyone? What if the fact that half the population is managing to move forward is actually creating an illusion that our economy is working? Let’s take a break from the screen for a moment and then come back to that thought. The way we work hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. A pandemic needed to happen before we could take a step forward together.
Before it risked our health, we thought it was normal to sit in traffic every morning to be able to clock in on time. Before remote working showed that we could do our jobs without being physically in the office, the number of hours we spent at work was seen as a good measure of how solid our career felt. Actually, presenteeism has taken on a life of it’s own in lockdown as well. It’s never been talked about, because our countries don’t champion guiding a corporate culture, they prefer loyalty.
What’s more, the working day ignores what happens at school: schools seem to forget that parents work (for example, in the summer). So adding more services isn’t enough. Paying people more wouldn’t be enough either: we’d have to ask companies how much they pay women, and to demonstrate if and why they are paid up to 30% less than their counterparts. The pay gap is a consequence, not an intention. It’s the consequence of a culture that sees the problem as a series of obstacles on a race track, so their first thought (without actually putting those thoughts into action) is to remove the obstacles. In that way, women can run and experience “competitive conditions”, just like men do.
So shall we make a list of 100 things to watch, measure and act upon to close the gender gap? Or shall we just accept the idea that this gap is a deafening sign that the system isn’t working for anyone? Everyone is limping along – just some limp less thanks to the fact others are limping twice as much. Could our running track look different? Maybe we could work in a different way so we don’t have to increase the amount of services available to keep us happy? Maybe we could work to making society happier in general? More nurseries to allow women to work as much as men, or a different way of sharing tasks, hours, compensation, dreams? Are we going to be more competitive so we can win first place, or are we going to invest more in “human capital” so the track welcomes everyone, even those who can only walk instead of run?
Maybe we can see this as an opportunity to make radical changes to the way in which we work. An opportunity to observe 100 things that are stopping women from progressing, connecting them and seeing how they are stalling politics and our economy. Women are the symptom of the ‘problem’, but they can also be the cure. By listening to them and giving them a level playing field, they’re not “competitive” but “contributors”. They don’t take something away from society, they contribute to influential decisions, radically pushing us towards a change that we can no longer live without.
When women will be able to work and live as they want to, and not like men do, we’ll have started to build a more sustainable future for everyone. If that’s what we want.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
Going into business to offer new and diverse solutions. Getting used to talking about money, because financial independence protects us and frees us. Getting familiar with the concept of female power, even if it’s something they never showed us at school – even if it’s existed for centuries according to the archeologist Marija Jimbutas. A few ideas to escape the dead end that gender equality (or lack thereof) seems to have designated for us. It’s a bottleneck that doesn’t just slow women down, but rather the evolution of the entire species. Our limits are risking the sustainability of the entire planet.
Pointing the finger at the problem, the pandemic for example, is something we’ve started to see in governing conversations. But it’s a mistake to look for solutions in a single direction. Through the pandemic, we’ve paid the price of choices made by entire groups of people. The same group that’s guided our countries for the last 50 years. Because making decisions also means taking responsibility.
We tell ourselves that we need numbers. “Proof” that tells us if what we’re doing is right or wrong, if it works or not. Even if what works isn’t necessarily right, and what works less well could be less wrong. Then we see those numbers again: the new World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report tells us that the UK could do better, and Italy even more so. Of course, if it was a leaderboard we’d be cheering ourselves on. Italy is in 63rd place (an embarrassing position for the 8th strongest economy in the world, for a country where women have been able to vote for the last 76 years). Italy climbed 13 places compared to last year thanks to a political evaluation that increased the number of politicians. But it’s still one of the 81 / 156 economies in the report that have never had a female prime minister. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange?
Actually no, we don’t think it’s strange. It seems stranger to see two politicians “argue” over who is going to be the party whip. We think of them as fights because it seems so strange that women should talk about it when men usually hold this role. Rather than hold conferences and investigations as to why women can’t break the glass ceiling.
The data from the report tells us that women study well, even if they often choose the “wrong” subjects. It tells us that they have more or less the same chances of being physically well and surviving as long as men. But when it comes to finances and politics, we’re still lagging behind – in Italy and in the rest of the world. We make progress – education and healthcare is increasingly available to more people. But culture remains at a standstill. Culture is the longing and knowledge of how to make space for diversity.
We need to want to change things, not just to make progress: the direction might change, we might slow down and the objectives may vary.
This happens when people mix and enrich each other. It’s not an acquisition process, it’s a fusion process.
It’s clear that we’re struggling with a need for change. Last week, I started the day by talking about gender equality with 80 managers of a company. They asked me how they could avoid talking about diversity as a politically correct issue. I told them we have to know “why” we were talking about it.
It’s important to know why we’re talking about women and money. Girls and pocket money. Our aversions to risk. The inherent ability to innovate. It’s why we spoke to 30 high school girls about their thoughts on STEM subjects and why they considered studying them – after 90 minutes, 70% said they wanted to! The gender gap is still evident, it’s the distance between the opportunities for men and women that continues to progress. If we continue the way we’re doing so, it will take us 135 years to become equals. That’s compared to 99 in the previous report.
There’s a film from 1981 where Massimo Troisi tries to “bridge the gap” between him and a vase, solely by using his thoughts. If the vase moved, his life would change. But just by thinking “come here”, the distance remained the same. Troisi is fortunate though, because at least for him the distance stayed the same. Unfortunately we can’t say the same for the human race and a concept of gender equality that’s slipping out of our hands.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
Rethink. Redesign. Transform. These are just a few key words that have emerged from companies when describing the post-pandemic new normal. In this scenario, future skills at work are constantly evolving. HR Directors play an important role in valuing their people’s true potential.
Any form of forward-planning risks becoming obsolete very quickly. Transferable skills, linked to the ability to learn and think, are the only ones that we can plan for. They are truly needed across all sectors, even the most technical ones. But the ability to know which skills will be useful in future can’t solely be a top-down exercise. It’s much more effective to engage collective intelligence, so that people can discover their own attitudes.
To do so, we need to “widen the map”. It’s precisely what Riccarda Zezza, Lifeed CEO, spoke about at the Strategic workforce planning event, organized by HRC. It means understanding that a company’s ‘what’ and ‘how’ may change, making it ever more important to focus on ‘why’ they do what they do. This is where data comes into play. Aside from behaviors, People Analytics allows us to value our talents’ identity dimensions and characteristics. We need to adjust our line of vision to include these dimensions in relation to life experiences (working on both Big and Small data). In this way, HR can become “map experts”, valuing the true potential of their employees.
On the other hand, “HR teams are no longer just business partners – they’re essentially the business itself” explained Alessandro Agosti, HR Director at Findomestic. “HR accompanies transformations and can decidedly accelerate change by anticipating the need for new skills”.
According to Andrea Bellina, Head of Talent & Organization at Engie, strategy is guided by business. But it’s a close contact with HR that can make strategies a reality through training and upskilling journeys. Many companies are now looking for data management skills to understand the current situation and predict future trends.
Business and HR inputs can find a balance between research into market resources and valuing internal skills. In this sense, “plug-and-play approaches don’t work, it takes time to transfer and develop new skills, even from an intergenerational point of view”, stated Alessandra Rizzi Group HR & Organization Director at BFF Banking Group. “HR management alone won’t be able to anticipate these skills. They need to team up with top management, finding ways to not lose skills and guarantee people’s employability levels throughout this delicate phase”.
Time is a key factor. “We need to get ready for when business will change in line with consumer trends”, underlined Silvia Sulpizi, Senior HR manager Global Supply Chain at Baker Hughes. She believes it’s useful to analyze behaviors (not just hard skills) that will be needed in future transitions, allowing us to understand who will be ready to take the next step.
Workforce planning is closely linked to corporate strategy: for Luca Barbera, Head of Planning & Organization Global Power Generation at Enel Group, “we need to understand the main business drivers that will allow us to plan the evolution of internal resources. HR can create value within the corporate strategy, with the aim of being able to foresee the future of work”.
In this context, technical skills don’t go far enough. People also need “the right attitude, a startup mentality and a data-driven approach”. When people focus on behaviors, they can change their working environment and still find new opportunities. It’s why it’s so important to broaden our knowledge, especially in this transition we all find ourselves going through.
We don’t speak a lot about time. Time that passes, the phase that we’re living in. Time is an implicit concept that underpins everything. It risks becoming invisible. But there are three reasons why it’s still important to talk about time, a reflection that helps us see things in a new way, considering it more.
First, for the first time since the dawn of civilization, the whole world is going through the same time period. The world wars didn’t even touch the whole world in this way, they didn’t stretch to every nation. From Italy to the UK, Brasil to the US: everywhere is sharing in the pandemic experience. There have been other pandemics, but we couldn’t communicate with everyone back then. It wasn’t a shared experience. The third decade of the third millennium has put us all in the same boat. Well, we were already on the same boat, but we thought that we had a right to own our own point in time. It’s created a moment in time where we’re all together.
The second reason is that, currently, we don’t have access to the places that we would meet each other usually. What’s a Zoom meeting if it’s not in a temporary room, where space has a defined duration? We’re not together in a place, but at a time: from this minute to that one. We’re all in different spaces.
Digital calendars are our new maps: we’re in the same place and we move to the next event. We only move in terms of time. When we set a time, we put a mark on the map. Everyone agrees to see you “there”. Not in a space, at a calendar appointment. In time, we don’t arrive in the physical sense, but with the mind. Isn’t it funny how it’s the only movement that’s allowed at the moment when we’re protecting our physical health? Over the last year, we’ve established that our physical health is more important, or more fragile, than mental health. It comes first, alone. And in this way, our minds sustain our still bodies.
We can be in the same room with someone but be far away in terms of time and not understand each other. The moment we’re living in can influence our ability to listen and understand, what we’re ready to be. Giving ourselves an hour to meet isn’t enough: we also need to make sure that we’re there, present in the same moment. At least enough time to make our own map a little bigger. It’s not about asking where you are but “when you are?”. What moment of life are you living through, irrespective of where you find yourself?
Lots of questions have changed over the past year. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ask people what plans they have, even more useless to ask where they are. But the question “in which moment are you in?” could open new horizons. Because we’re all going through a collective transition, translated into a personal transition for all of us, where time and things meet each day. It’s life.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
Life has an incredible ability to hone our skills. Everyday experiences can have a huge impact on people’s motivation when it comes to learning. The soft skills that are most in-demand in today’s world are often difficult to train in the classroom. But those same skills can be developed through our private experiences, developing a new awareness that allows us to transfer and apply those skills between our personal and professional spheres. Digital is key to making this a reality. Riccarda Zezza, CEO di Lifeed spoke about it in a #BecomeWhoYouWantToBe interview for GoDaddy Talks, talking to digital leaders in the sector. Here’s what she had to say.
What I do is closely linked to who I am. The fact that I became an entrepreneur, that I have my own company that sells something that I’ve experienced in my own life, it all represents who I am. I often ask myself if I’m happy and convinced in what I’m doing. Up until now, my honest answer has been yes – it’s the right path for me. As long as that’s my answer, it’s all good.
True self-awareness is realising that you already have everything you need. These skills are already yours – it’s awareness that really makes the difference, across all life transitions. Even through the pandemic, the challenges that you’re facing can hone the skills that you already have. When you try to apply those skills in different contexts, you’ll discover that you have even more resources available to you.
When you put that concept into practice, you’ll also find that life gets easier. You no longer have to compartmentalise everything. You’ll realise that certain behaviours and mechanisms work everywhere. If you’re good at saying ‘no’ at work, you can become good at setting boundaries at home. If you’re a warm and encouraging person at home, you can bring those same traits out in the office. It’s all about building relationships with those around you. When clients onboard with us, they often continue to renew again and again. It’s because once they’ve grasped this concept, once they can see their people for all they really are, they find they get a lot more out of them. People will share with you the things that you can see. If you choose to not see parts of their lives, you’ll miss out on so much that they have to offer. It’s a revolution.
Female empowerment isn’t and end, it’s a means. We’re not focusing on empowerment for the good of women, we think it’s important because society needs their contribution. We’re wasting their resources. Women are champions of care: it’s an element that’s key to the survival of our race. Caregiving is key across all age groups. If we weren’t able to care for others, we’d already be extinct. So we can’t de-prioritize care, it can’t become less important than the state of the economy. Rather, it has to become an essential part of the economy, because it’s the only thing that will make it sustainable over time.
Our collective narrative needs to be updated, and we are all narrators. 73% of all employees are caregivers in some role in their life. The other 27% are probably still caring for another being in some way – it’s just that they don’t recognize their role in it yet. We all care for someone else. We all hone skills through these experiences. And if we don’t see those skills, it’s like we’re throwing them away. But we need those skills! This idea all stems from a culture of care, it’s at the heart of our existence.
Lifeed started out as MAAM – a classroom-based soft skills training program. After a couple of years in the classroom, we wrote a book, we became a bit frustrated. We couldn’t grow the business in that format, it wasn’t scalable. On one hand, I wanted to reach as many people as possible, while on the other hand I realised that the market offered growth avenues that would not otherwise be available to you. I wanted to grow in line with the market. So about 6 years ago, we had a lightbulb moment. We decided we wanted to take these learning materials online – the same content and questions that “switch on” this awareness for people. Digital is the best place for people to do just that. It means people can write about their experiences online, we can listen to them and then accompany them throughout the rest of their learning experience.
I believe digital is a powerful tool. But sometimes I think it’s easy for us to forget that we get to decide how it’s used. Over the past year, we’ve seen how it’s saved us. It’s allowed us to continue doing a whole range of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. But what will happen when this is all over? Will we continue to acquire knowledge at the same speed? Or will we stop and ask ourselves why we need digital? It’s important to ask those questions. Otherwise we risk that digital decides what we do, rather than us deciding for digital.
When you start a business, there’s always a chance that people blur into the background – you have to focus on numbers, sales and growth. As you grow, more people join you – both your team and the number of people who use your platform. Sometimes I ask myself if I’m changing the world in any way. It’s enough for me to know that I’ve encouraged one person to put themselves forward for promotion after returning from parental leave. 73% of our users say that their leadership skills have developed through their life transitions. It’s the truth – but it only comes out when you’re asking the right questions. Every person who takes part on a Lifeed journey will have an impact on the people around them. Everything has a knock-on effect.
What’s behind a CV? It’s a paradox in itself that it’s called a curriculum vitae. Literally it means “life career”, when in reality it only allows space for our work and not our lives. LinkedIn – perhaps the most powerful online CV tool that exists – demonstrates just that. It hosts 766 million CVs, but up until recently life events were seen as a “gap”. Unless an experience was connected to a specific company or professional role, it wasn’t possible to add it to your profile. The best option that LinkedIn offered was “housewife”. Just like those old-fashioned forms you have to fill in when you register a birth or marriage.
So if we weren’t working and weren’t a housewife, LinkedIn didn’t offer any other options. For years these experiences have been vague, we haven’t defined them. But things are changing. A recent announcement shows that LinkedIn are trying to modernize their approach, making space for caregiving roles on our CVs. Is the idea that users can choose from 10 roles to define their period of… absence, gaps and career interruptions? Think maternity leave, illness, sabbatical, grief, caregiving leave. Anomalies, unexpected instances, life avenues that deviate from the linear nature of careers. They’re often unable to be defined in our professional narrative because they are seen as referring to a parallel universe, rather than experiences that naturally intersect with our work. Even before Zoom meetings became the bread-and-butter of our days, it was impossible to split our identities in two like that.
The past year has challenged our continuity. We’ve found it difficult to identify time spent “working” and time spent doing “other things”. Hands up if you’ve felt like you’re on a hamster wheel at any point: we get up, we log on, we work, we eat, we go to bed, we get up, we log on, we work… and so on. It happened because we haven’t been able to experience discontinuity, or rather the spatial boundaries that define our work and lives. We haven’t experienced distance or alternative settings.
And so it’s felt as though our schedules are “full”. Maybe, for the first time we’ve seen gaps in a different way: the event that we had to miss, to be somewhere else, to do (or go along with) other choices and continue to “be there”. It’s harder to measure the result. We’ve contributed to our “household” surviving. At the end of the day, economics means “organizing the home”.
So do we exist outside the way we define our CVs? Is it true that mothers that call who call themselves the family “Chief of Operations” have sparked a LinkedIn revolution? Do we need to keep evolving the way we define ourselves in order to feel represented, even when we’re using a platform where people still hold us up to “traditional” standards where we’re seen as anomalies? Think mothers, caregivers, fathers on parental leave, those on a year out, those who decide to take time out away from studying or working?
We call them career breaks, but what are they breaks from? Time moves on for everyone. Experiences accumulate, skills develop, life progresses and new dimensions arrive on the scene. A few days ago, LinkedIn user Masia Maria Gisa, talked about it as a “gap in her CV”. Her post saw over 10,000 likes and 400 comments:
There’s a gap in my CV.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my company let me go in the last three days of my probation period. I had invested a lot in what seemed like a dream opportunity. I’d turned down other jobs and moved to a new city.
Then another, bigger problem arose: my brother became seriously ill.
Over the course of a week, I packed up the boxes that I’d opened 6 months before, left my home, loaded up my car with stuff and prayers, and I drove straight to him while Italy was about to go into lockdown. I spent eight months managing a very painful situation, knowing full well that the time spent “out of work” would have been precious, as unfortunately I wouldn’t have been able to do it again. While attending doctors appointments, rushing to hospital, mulling over my fears and thoughts, I never stopped looking for work. Throughout the few – given the current situation – interviews I had, I never talked about my story, even though I was developing so many skills. Flexibility, the ability to manage emotions and the never-ending study and search for better solutions.
There’s a gap in my CV.
People ask me about it with suspicion and prejudice. I’m only talking about it now I’ve found work. Those of you that can see a gap can look beyond it, without being scared of choosing the “wrong” candidate.
Under that post, there are 400 other stories: our career “gaps”, the essence of our lives. All the moments and events that don’t fit neatly into the drop down menu on a digital CV. But it’s those experiences that help us grow, doubt, learn and choose again, perhaps in a different way or reinforcing the choices that we’ve already made. Outside of our CV, up until now, we had life. Linkedin’s recent update is powerful because it makes a new format available for an existing choice, evolving the perceptions of millions of people all over the world. Today more than ever, the way we talk about and define our experiences must change in order to allow alternative avenues to exist.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
The statistics leave little to be desired: only 1 in 4 high-growth companies are led by female founders. What’s more, investments into female-led businesses are declining – receiving just 1.5% of UK investment. At the same time, the gender gap continues to close, with a record-breaking 72.4% of British women in employment in 2019 (vs 78.4% male employment).
This scenario is the same across Europe. Female financial literacy was one of the hot topics presented by Prometeia at Forum Women ONboarding, a UniCredit initiative as part of the UniCredit4Women journey designed to value talent and female growth in the world of banking.
According to Francesco Giordano, Co-CEO Commercial Banking Western Europe at UniCredit, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to female digital entrepreneurship and financial skills. To support women in this area, UniCredit has launched two new initiatives: a female mentoring journey (Women ONboarding) and four Banking Academy financial education journeys. The initiative is part of a wider strategy within the group to protect all forms of diversity and favour inclusion.
Lifeed CEO Riccarda Zezza was part of the panel. The event offered an opportunity to understand how female founders can make all the difference in our post-covid world. In particular, a new generation of entrepreneurs can teach their children to see their finances in a different way. “Women are inherently innovative, offering something different to the status quo on the market, where most businesses are male”, explained Riccarda Zezza.
“Female founders can bring something specific to the table. They can build new paths without having to radically adapt their thoughts or language. It’s important for women to go into business because the world needs a different point of view and new solutions. It’s not about allowing women to run on the same track as the men. Instead, it’s about changing the track to make it more suitable, welcoming the potential of all involved”.
To express their potential, women need to be financially independent. Today, education really makes the difference. But few girls choose to study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), as Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta, astrophysicist and Chief Diversity Officer at the European Space Agency highlighted. “STEM subjects have a great potential to empower women and raise employment figures. They give the highest pay rises and reach gender equality in a shorter time frame”.
According to the World Economic Forum, it will take at least two centuries to bridge the gap between men and women. Italy is way down the Osce gender gap list when it comes to financial knowledge. There are still too few female-led businesses. The ones that do exist are noted for their innovation and social focus.
Scarpetta also emphasised the importance of mentorship for young women. It’s about making space for them to share their experiences and find solutions through their network. It starts with following positive and inclusive leaders. Antonella Mansi, President of the Florentine Centre for Italian Fashion, believes STEM education “is crucial, together with family and scholastic education, ensuring women are ready for the world of business”.
Educating our children on financial independence is incredibly important. Irene Facheris, expert and trainer in gender studies, remembers how her parents taught her to manage her pocket money on an Excel file when she was a child. “Families (and in particular, women) require more financial education”. That’s not all. “School plays its part too, because the pay gap problem starts before we even reach the world of work. We also need to consider that financial violence happens in the family context when managing financial resources”.
The idea of sustainable entrepreneurship, from a human point of view, was highlighted by Lavinia Biagiotti, president and CEO of the Biagiotti Group, who believes “we’re here to leave a legacy for both the environment and people”.
Finally Magda Bianco, Director of the department for client protection and financial education at the Bank of Italy, highlighted the correlation between the level of financial and mathematical competencies. “Schools need to focus on finance, which society often sees as a negative thing. We also need to look at maths in a less competitive and more engaging way. If we can avoid creating stereotypes, we’ll give women more confidence in their own abilities”.
It’s still at the top of the list in the workplace, perhaps now more than ever. We’re talking about diversity and inclusion. So many companies are too young, too old, from too many ethnic backgrounds, too feminist, too new, too *insert difference here* for the system to be able to treat as ‘normal’.
We’re loosing too many, as an army commander would say – or perhaps even a HR director. In reality, we’re loosing too many people because we’re not able to see them for all they really are. We’re trying to transform them into a ‘normal’ that no longer exists. By even trying to normalize people they’re failing one by one: starting with courses to teach women how to look less different, and more similar to traditional power models. It’s how they’ve lost thousands of people. We’ve lost talent because they’ve never had the opportunity to talk with us. We’ve lost those who couldn’t pretend to be the same any longer. It’s as though they’ve had to pretend to be “less” than their whole complexity, when it’s that very diversity that makes our stories and talent unique.
Nobody knew how to say it better than Bozoma Saint John, Chief Marketing Officer at Netflix:
“We hide those broken pieces. Is as if we like to pretend as though they don’t exist. We like to wear the mask, which then is created by somebody somewhere. Somebody said “this is the perfect way to be a leader”. But it’s not true. The ways that we are are important. I’ve lost count of the amount of times in meetings, to benefit this mass idea, we make everything vanilla, losing what is really important”.
Every person’s story counts, says Bozoma in a video filmed for a Harvard Business School course “Anatomy of a badass”: our stories are the only things that really count.
I’m a better executive because I’m an immigrant. And I’m a better executive because I’m a single mother to an 11 year old. I’m a better executive because I’m a widow and because I know how to dance. And I’m always going to say that loud.
It’s always the truth, even when we don’t feel immediately different. We all carry a unique story, we’re always too rich to be boxed off into someone else’s definition. Everybody’s story is cut out when we try to be what other people expect us to be, or rather what we think other people expect.
It’s not an illusion. Stereotypes exist and govern our social and professional lives. It’s natural and instinctive to want to feel like others. Belonging to a collective ground is a precondition to our existence. Being a “badass”, as the famous Harvard course explained, doesn’t mean doing what you want without respecting others. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s the intention to be completely ourselves and that social norms can help us to avoid the chaos: creating shared spaces of expression that make space for authenticity, inclusion and harmony.
Are we pushing beyond the rules that already exist? Not really, because a lot of the definitions that we observe today don’t really reflect us any more, and adapting to them is tiring. This Harvard course highlights that the ability to show our true selves improves our performance and engagement at work. It’s even more true if we can show that we’re different when we feel victims to stereotypes: a type of “anti-fragile” effect where showing our vulnerabilities makes us stronger.
So, what do we need to do? How can we increase inclusion? How can we bring together our individual intensions to strengthen our companies’ efforts to make space for diversity? It’s a hot topic, so much so that I recently took part in a Horasis conference about “We are who we are”, talking to a Greek member of parliament, three American executives and a Bloomberg journalist.
The first step is always the hardest: it’s about our ability to see ourselves for who we really are. What’s remains if we remove other people’s expectations from the mix? It’s not an easy question to answer: it’s a way of looking at ourselves bit by bit, keeping watch on our circumstances and what we do and say, observing what belongs to us and what belongs to the “mask”.
We don’t need to criticize ourselves – we don’t need more guilt! – but we need to see those things, give them a name, be grateful for the security they’ve given us and try to look behind those things. Knowing how to think it natural, and looking behind the mask is a reflective process. So as Harvard teaches us about inclusion, we need to add an organizational component into the mix. The intentional awareness to advance those parts of ourselves, to make them visible in our day to day lives.
Diversity and inclusion in companies or in life touches all of us, not those who are “different”. If a “normal” person did exist in the world, they’d be surrounded by people with rich and expansive stories that couldn’t be contained in other people’s definitions. It would be a representation or a minority, and those special projects would be perfect for them.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
