The reasons behind our choice

What we built in these 30 years of regulatory activity has now reached maturity. The Art Nouveau building that hosted the headquarters of Di Renzo Regulatory Affairs, from its first 5 employees to the nearly 100 of today, has become – day after day, year after year – more and more squeezing.

Habits and affections for this well-known location have been a special glue, but three years ago I started to look for a new place, because I believe that people have the right to work in a wide, dynamic, bright, comfortable space, with maximum availability of means and expression.

In this adventure I brought with me anyone wishing to follow, to grow together professionally and I hope – also humanly.

I am proud and lucky to say that have never dismissed anyone and I have suffered every time someone has left Di Renzo Regulatory Affairs to try other bold experiences.

I believe it is part of the game of life. On the other hand, I have been told that the presence of Di Renzo Regulatory Affairs in the CV of a regulatory professional is considered as a guarantee of quality. This is a great satisfaction for someone like me, who founded a whole company on the formation and competence of his collaborators.

The search for new headquarters lasted three years, considering dozens of possibilities. It cost me great physical and mental efforts. Inspecting premises, studying documents, making thorough research, entrusting professionals, imagining each premise as it could have been turned into my idea of a workplace.

And now that this step has been finally taken, now that Di Renzo Regulatory Affairs is moving to an elegant and well-lit structure in Via dell’Arco di Travertino, with 4 floors and 2,000 square metres, I wonder: was it worth? Yes.

In the last months of renovations, during which I have seen the spaces and rooms of the new headquarters come to shape, I imagined how I would feel to enter a place like this at 20, when I was still an apprentice in this career. I think I would have been very proud: proud to be part of something steady, built based on criteria and knowledge, conceived to make people feel good and safe. Created to make immediately clear, at the first look, that there are prospects. A future prospect. A prospect of growing.

Sometimes, observing my staff, I wonder what they expect from life: in my time, we did not look for something safe, but for something true, honest and solid. I built Di Renzo Regulatory Affairs on this idea and on this idea I hope it will keep growing. In these 30 years I have seen my collaborators turning from newly graduated youngsters into professionals, mothers and fathers. I have the arrogance of feeling partly responsible as well as the satisfaction of never making them perceive that modern sense of uncertainty that is still depriving working people of any creative possibility of expressing themselves, confining them in the execution of a task they fear they could otherwise lose.

The working environment is a complex system, a sort of living organism: it breathes, it is fed, it is sensitive to inner moods and it is subject to several continuous outer pushes. I like to think it as a sort of dance, where everyone tries to follow the same melody, to harmonise with the other’s movements.

Managing a business organisation, either big or small, is not simple. Each concerned party has its values, its very personal reasons, first of all the financial aspects and the certainty of the working place. It is important to have the feeling of working in a solid and well-organised company, with a management ready to face new problems and difficult situations, and whose organisation is based on well-defined short- and long-term programs. It is important because it clears out mental space, stealing it from anxiety, uncertainty and worries.

Then there is the psychological aspect: everyone wants to feel useful and to deny this chance would be a trauma for the whole organisation, because it would mean crushing into others, instead of collaborating with them.

This change of location is a great revolution, whose message is however full of prospects, of further growth and development. I hope I was able to transmit to my collaborators – now that the available space is wider, efficient, bright and well equipped – how important their wellbeing is: the wellbeing of each person that is part of my organisation, regardless his or her specific role, is an essential aspect for the success of any business project. It is the people, with their own identity, culture, inclinations, with their inner dynamics, either positive or negative, with their egoisms or with their sense of cooperation, that continuously change the path and the success or failure of all.

I live in the belief that what you do for others always comes back as a collective benefit. Being part of a healthy and true organisation, taking into account the professional satisfaction of each person and the fairness and consistency of personal relations, is something that goes well beyond the current ideas of uncertainty and working prospects: it is the luck of being able to work and live without worries.

Here it is, this is the idea of a workplace I was looking for our new headquarters. Not simply a “happy island”, that looks so much like a utopia and a segregation from the world, but a continuum with life. It is impossible to believe that spending 8 hours every day in a place has nothing to do with life.

Sante Di Renzo