The Polo Circolabile: disability management at Loro Piana

The Polo Circolabile found a champion at Loro Piana in Cecilia Cerra. Thanks to her personal sensitivity (her own son is disabled) and professional expertise, she initiated the project with the objective of fostering cultural change in the company with regard to disabilities.

To begin, two days of corporate volunteering were organized in collaboration with the Special Olympics Association and the LVMH Group. This was an opportunity to engage with people with disabilities for company employees through sports activities, and to talk about their personal experiences with temporary illnesses or disabilities. These two events provided the content for the video Close to Me, an internal communication tool that helped establish the cultural premises for the project.

The Polo Circolabile is primarily a space for handcrafting products, set up inside the company, where people with disabilities from the Orso Blu Cooperative and the Special Olympics Association work on fabrics and materials and take on tasks that were previously outsourced. The cooperative, and in particular association president Francesca Vincio, played key roles in establishing and developing the Polo at Loro Piana, a project which has evolved on several fronts.

First, in terms of space. Initially, the Polo workers were given a large hall, which was usually used to simulate the sales floor in a store, so periodically it had to be cleared out for this purpose. Later, to avoid this problem, the company decided to allocate an open space with desks in the men’s department for the project. This meant more stability and prompted a change in the relationships between the disabled people and employees. In fact, the Loro Piano staff had the chance to spend time with the Polo workers and came to appreciate not only their technical and manual skills but also their commitment and dedication to their jobs.

The second evolution was in the activities that the Polo workers performed. They began by creating objects from unused material for specific occasions, or removing labels from unsold stock so they could be donated to third-sector associations. One of their new activities was to create Christmas gifts for employees: with fabric remnants the workers made bookmarks. These gifts were very popular and also helped to form a fresh perspective on workers with disabilities, who were no longer seen as capable of doing only reductive, routine tasks. More activities were added too, such as organizing a digital archive of the Loro Piano legacy, consisting of 5,000 physical garments, a priority project for the company.

The ultimate goal was not only to set up a social hub, where reverse-mentoring activities could take place, making it easier to share skills and activities with other divisions but also to legitimize the Polo as an autonomous organizational division in its own right. To achieve this, the first step was to come up with a visual identity and a logo, to then design an actual label to affix to Polo-made items. This served to shine a light on inclusion in the workplace and to promote the project both within the company and on the market. In addition, ISNET, an association which supports social enterprises, made an initial estimate of the social impact of the project. Beyond the advantages linked to the corporate climate and employee motivation, findings showed that for every euro invested in the project, the ROI was €2.19.

The Polo could be seen as a form of segregation for the people with disabilities who are involved, as they work in a separate space; their “office” is in the building, but they are not full-fledged employees of Loro Piana. Although they are inside the organization, they remain outsiders, both because they belong to a cooperative and because their physical space is internal to but independent from the rest of the organization. This calls for a reflection on the future of the Polo as an autonomous entity, and on the position of disabled workers in the company.

By the same token, granted these limitations, the creation of the Polo, has helped transform the way people view disabilities, setting a positive process in motion at every level, both in relation to HR processes and the organizational culture. As an example of the first, a protocol has been established for recruitment, and the language used for job descriptions has been revised to avoid stereotypes and biases, collaborating with external suppliers. The second is enhanced through training and awareness-raising activities for employees.

The objectives which aim to shore up this project in the future are myriad: to allocate a budget, on par with all the other functions; to analyze the social impact of the project to communicate the benefits that it can offer the local community; to ramp up external communication and consolidate the project further from an organizational standpoint; to disseminate the skills that have been honed thanks to the Polo at Loro Piano.