Motivating Value
June 28th, 2010
After a beautiful weekend away in Cinque Terra and Florence all refreshed, we re-grouped this morning ready for another exciting day of touring more co-ops. Today we went to Imola which is about 30 km from Bologna. Imola is special in that it has a high concentration of industrial co-ops and even the large consortium (which many coops are members of…kind of like a Central 1 that has many credit unions that belong to it) called LEGACOOP that has a special branch LEGACOOP Imola due to the high density of coops in Imola. This town is also well known worldwide for its Grand Prix race.
In the morning we visited LEGACOOP Imola and then went to visit a social coop called Cooperativa Sociale Giovani Rilegatore aka “Young Book Binders”. They specialize in bookbinding, copying, assembly and filing (just like Iron Mountain, but more technologically advanced as they will scan all your documents and provide them back to the companies via email at their request). The unique part is that they provide jobs to workers who are disadvantaged physically, mentally or drug addictions. While they run a viable for profit business they also profit the social wealth of the community.
I was impressed the moment we stepped into the door. The President greeted us and right away said he was the President and had a nice office; however, you would never find him there! Where would he be? Being Italian maybe out for an espresso? Nope! He was in the factory with the workers. He was always with them as a worker and even though they were disadvantaged they were never considered disadvantaged or characterized into disabilities, they were “just workers”. It was so humbling to see how genuine the President spoke of the workers and himself.
Later we visited 3Elle which is an industrial co-op that is one of the largest wood manufacturers in Italy. They are made up of workers and members. Not all workers have to be members but if you want to be a member you must purchase shares of 46,000 euros! You have to be working there for 4 years before you can apply for membership. Last year 40 workers applied and only 4 got accepted. They are accepted based on their commitment to their job and interest and contributions to the cooperative. We asked the question whether workers would be unmotivated to continue working if they never got accepted year after year of applying. The President’s response was surprising because he said that it actually KEPT them motivated to be better workers to achieve the reward of membership. This notion just seemed so hard to comprehend in our culture in Canada as we need to be incented to be happy to be working for our employers and our employers have to strive to keep their employees engaged. In this Italian cooperative environment, the employee is motivated intrinsically. Can we ever get to this point? Or will our employer have to keep us motivated? Does this mean that we don’t have vocations in our careers?
