A New Start to a New Year

By John Beattie

John Beattie

With the bustle of the holidays receding, most of us have returned to the shop for a brand-new calendar year and all that will arrive in the coming months.

I like the beginning of the year. We’re busy putting plans in place to take our shop and craftsmanship to the next level (check out Mark Inboden’s blog post on this subject earlier in the week). One of my focus areas will be to increase our teamwork efforts. When you have 20-plus people in a production area, it’s important to work as a team. With a solid teamwork ethic in place at UCEC, our job as the Management Team is to envision the next level. Our talented team members deserve no less.

Our primary focus is to take care of the customer. So, lately, I have been planning the best ways to do that with the team. One player cannot win the game; you need the rest of the team to get there. We have some areas we can improve on even with our seasoned staff. Everyone, everywhere, can always improve.

One thing I know we’ll work on: improving cross training. We have skilled teams in mechanical, wiring and shipping/receiving. As our team members increase their knowledge base and technical skills, we will shift cross-trained resources where needed.

Different people are motivated by different things. I’ve learned you can’t just put people in a single bucket. So, we’ll be working toward becoming a more cohesive team and creating an expanded team-player environment. I look forward to seeing where 2016 takes us!

John is Operations Manager for Production for UCEC.

More UCEC Stories from Arvada, Colorado