BELONG To People

Discovering Teddy, step by step

• WORK
• CAREER
• GROWTH

There are loves and sympathies that grow “from a distance”, slowly. The story of Fabiana Urbinati with Teddy shows this same dynamics. From 2001 to 2012 Fabiana was a happy employee at a well-known labor consultancy firm in Rimini. She was advisor to different companies among which there was also Teddy, which at that time employed about 800 people and, in Fabiana’s eyes, made an impression for its dimensions as well as for its peculiar way of doing and thinking. 

She would have never imagined to go and work for it one day. But that it is what happened. In 2012 Teddy decided to establish its own internal payroll office and thus offered Fabiana to become the head of the office and be employed at Teddy. “I was excited about it, I felt honored; however I also was scared because it meant to leave the workplace I regarded as my second home for 11 years”, she remembers.After discussing with her boss and colleagues, she decided to accept the offer. She was confident about her decision even though her heart was not so light. The curiosity and will to do were strictly and inevitably connected to the fear for change and a new beginning.

And the impact was actually strong. Without any former head of the office to introduce her to the work, Fabiana was catapulted into a Company where everything changes fast and where it is not easy to keep up with everything, above all for those like her who carry out a job made of rules, protocols and procedures to be complied with, which force her and her colleagues to play a quite uncomfortable role. She speaks about that time and smiles: “At the beginning not everyone loved us: in order to do our job well we often needed to give rules and limits, which inevitably damped the enthusiasm of those who wanted to take off at a fast speed with a new project or the creation of a new team. Sometimes they still call us “the bureaucrats”, but after all these years I know that we are highly respected for what we do”.

In addition to that there is also another aspect, certainly more pleasant, that Fabiana remembers about her first years at Teddy. “When I was an external consultant and prepared the pay slips for Teddy, I had learned everyone’s surname, even though I completely ignored who those people were”. Little by little she started matching names to people and that later became the opportunity to build a professional and personal relationship, to experience, in a closer way, that way of doing and thinking she had seen years before while working as an external consultant. “Today the company has grown larger and larger, from 800 internal employees it has reached over 3,000, and yet I can see a true multinational corporation that still is an actual family-run company. People are not just a number, but there is a real attention to everyone I could experience firsthand and that makes me feel valued, truly respected”. Lastly, the Dream that cannot go unnoticed and at which Fabiana looks as a growth factor. “Working at Teddy has opened my mind and made me understand things that I would have never understood by myself. Looking at so many people with difficulties, physical or social ones, working here is rewarding.  When you meet them you understand how little it takes to do something good, to support them. It simply takes a relationship based on esteem and responsibility in order to start again all over and experience work in a rewarding and fulfilling way. As Vittorio Tadei, the founder of Teddy Group, used to say: “Any man is a creator when you place your trust in them”.