The story of Adriano Olivetti

When we look back on 2020, I’m quite confident that it is going to be known as the year of the devastating coronavirus pandemic, widespread riots in protest of police killings, live-streamed events, and the movement towards a better treatment of employees. This last point is going to be an especially important part of 2020, as we’ve already begun to see what I’m predicting is just going to be the start of this movement. 

Even as recently as May 1st, massive groups of employees at Walmart, Amazon, FedEx, Whole Foods, Target, Shipt, and Instacart banded together to organize a strike to help obtain hazard pay, better protective equipment, the immediate shutdown of infected locations, and other better working conditions. 

It seems like there has been a massive push for better employee treatment recently, which is a result of the troublesome conditions brought on by this pandemic. But not treating employees as human beings should not be the norm.

In fact, one of the biggest advocates of exceptional employee treatment can be traced back to the 1940s and 50s, which is when the Italian engineer and industrialist Adriano Olivetti was the head of Olivetti & C. SpA. Although his name has since entered partial obscurity, Olivetti used to be a household name all throughout Italy and the rest of Europe. This is mainly because Olivetti’s products were as groundbreaking as the iPhone was 10 years ago, but also because of his unprecedented beliefs that employee welfare should be placed above even the profits of the company.

A Brief History of Olivetti and His Revolutionary Ideas on Employee Rights

When Adriano Olivetti took over the business from his father in 1938, he did so under the agreement that he would never fire an employee for financial motives, something his father insisted upon. This meant he had the unique challenge of trying to grow the company without ever downsizing the staff during a time when more advanced machinery was already starting to replace workers in mass numbers. Adriano took the father’s recommendation to heart and became the first entrepreneur (and arguably the only one) to put workers, not profit, at the center of the factory.

With these beliefs, he rebuilt the factory to bring in as much light as possible and to allow the workers to enjoy the Alpi’s beautiful views from the inside. Later on, when he built a second one in Naples, he did so in a way that resembled a luxury hotel rather than a factory.  By providing his employees with a much more scenic setting to work in, it helped to directly or indirectly improve their quality of life. 

He also offered employees free healthcare (at a time when in Italy access to free healthcare wasn’t yet considered a human right), free daycare centers, a massive library, fringe benefits, and much more that would all directly result in better lives for his employees.

After only a few years, Olivetti had developed an entire community of buildings and services that were specifically designed to improve the lives of the community. By doing so, he had done so much for his employees that they saw Olivetti as a crucial leader of their community. However, the rest of Italy did not share this love and he was shunned as being too left for the Christian-Democrats but too much of an industrialist for the communists.

Olivetti had a strict platform that he used to run his company and determine the direction that it would take. This platform consisted of three main key points, all of which were not widely practiced in the manufacturing industry throughout Italy or any other developed country. 

The first rule stated that anyone who was hired at the company had to be paid at least 1/10th the salary of the highest-paid manager. This is vastly different from today’s society where the average lowest-earning full-time employees in the U.S. only make about 1/312 the wage of the highest-paid person at the company. 

The second rule was that every employee needed to have the freedom to bring up productive comments regarding the procedures, safety measures, or other elements of the workplace. This is, once again, very different from how the modern workplace operates. 

The third and final rule stated that employees should not be forced to give up their rural property when moving to the city to work at the facilities. Olivetti helped to prevent this by offering his employees loans with incredibly-low interest rates so that they could keep their rural property while also getting a place to stay in the city. He wanted to keep this connection between rural and modern cities, but most of all, he did not want them to lose their cultural heritage. It wasn’t a romantic love for nature or a desire to keep nicely curated gardens. He wanted a real connection between the two at a time when millions of people were moving to the city in search of work.

But the most important aspect of Olivetti’s vision is the fact that the company was extremely successful, proving that there is an alternative and better way of running a company.

How COVID-19 Has Popularized the Topic of Employee Treatment

By now, it has become clear that the coronavirus pandemic is having major and lasting effects on businesses of all sizes. In fact, there are about 7.5 million small businesses in the U.S. that are currently in danger of having to permanently close as a result of this pandemic. 

A lot of companies are trying to cut costs by laying off employees or taking government relief funds to try and get them through these tough times. Far too many companies, like the manufacturing giant Caterpillar, are choosing to keep their facilities operating in inadequate conditions, lay off hundreds of employees, while at the same time distributing $500 million to shareholders.

These actions have not gone unnoticed and the public is ramping up public shaming tactics to try and pressure these companies into treating their employees better. All it takes is one story reporting systematically poor treatment of employees at a certain company and it has a good chance to be picked up and circulated online. 

Even during normal conditions, having a viral negative social media campaign spread about a company is enough to cause some serious harm to both small and large businesses. However, this has become even more effective during this pandemic since all companies are already going to be in a vulnerable position. The perfect example of this is the launching of Bookshop.org, which is poised to be a community-first enterprise that takes a large portion of book sales away from Amazon. 

Now that more people are becoming aware of these issues and taking a specific interest in them, it actively hurts a company when they don’t take steps to ensure the health and happiness of their employees. So if a business wants to have the best chance of surviving this pandemic and the next 10 years, then their best bet is to adopt Olivetti’s mentality now. This means stop distributing funds to shareholders or executives and instead divert this money towards creating a better world for everyone. 

Success is driven by the value added to our world. Small brands and large corporations have a golden opportunity in front of them. Embrace Olivetti’s ideas now, even and especially during a time of crisis, and customers will reward you for many years to come.