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Dear <<First Name>>,
I know many of us have been brought up with a sense that we are special, and we are in a perpetual search for success on exciting and ever changing circumstances. Yet, it did not stop there; we have brought up our children to have the same expectations!
Being in charge of a team has me thinking a lot about the meaning of work and why we do what we do. Not every day brings “the” assignment, “the” learning opportunity. Is work something that we have to do or something we get to do? How do we make meaningfulness and hard work compatible?
As a teenager, I attended an Argentinean technical school shop for six years and did many boring tasks. Through sheer determination and elbow grease we would polish self-made wood boxes and cutouts for hours until they turned into shiny multilayered gifts for our mothers.
During the TED Radio Hour on NPR, psychologist Barry Schwartz, speaks about “How can a monotonous job be meaningful?.”
Dr. Schwartz explains how people at their jobs, most of the time, do the same thing over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, which can leave them yearning for something more. However, it’s about how we think about our job and how we can make our work valued that makes a difference. His example is about a study done by Yale University of janitors at a hospital setting. Their duties include vacuuming, cleaning toilets, waxing floors, etc. The same repetitious work every day. The janitors studied were actually doing much more than their obligations. They would interact with the patients and visitors, knowing that they were making an important contribution to the meaning and significance of the institution. They were playing a role in the hospitals goal of curing disease and easing suffering.
Team members need to feel valued and with a flexible work environment that allows some creativity, generating the opportunity to learn. If they are respected by their coworkers and supervisors, then they will become more engaged and find meaning to their work. They will find nobility and vocation in what they do.
For myself, that teenage work was not fun, however the lesson I took away was that it takes effort to create something of value.
Do you find your work meaningful? Do you find that you make a difference? The answer is within yourself.
Best regards,
Carlos Banchik,
President
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Project Highlight:
Camp Lee Canyon Cooler
Innova provided structural engineering services for a replacement refrigerator and freezer room that had been built underground in the side of the mountain at Camp Lee Canyon.
The original concrete room had been built back in 1936, and because the Camp is a historical site, great effort was made to preserve the historic character of the location, while bringing the cooler and freezer room up to code.
The green wooden door, the cupola, and the hand built stone wall that covered the face of the hill were carefully preserved and restored for future generations of campers.
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Project Highlight:
Creel Printing Press
Last year, Innova assisted Creel Printing with the design, fabrication, and installation of a new, 8-cell high-speed printing line at their facility in Las Vegas. Because printing presses are so sensitive to vibration and movement, they are usually installed on the ground, but in this instance, to maximize floor space, we were asked to take 4 cells and a drying oven and raise them onto a platform.
Elevating the printing line took this project to a whole new level of innovation, and required our engineers to work closely with the experts at Creel Printing and Goss International, their equipment manufacturer, so that the support structure met all the performance and budgetary needs.
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