HOW TO BUSINESS BUSINESSMANAGEMENT MANAGEMENT| |BY BYDAVID DAVIDHICKEY HICKEY
Engineering a Pandemic Response
H
arold Pedley, president and owner of Sign Engineering LLC in Puerto Rico, is accustomed to getting things done in-house. The company’s 102 employees handle just about every aspect of their vast business on their own. “We are an old-school sign shop,” he said. “We still bend neon in-house. We do our permits in-house. We do our own engineering and architecture in-house. We even do our own fleet mechanical work, including diesel and hydraulics, in-house. “We pride ourselves in that we have full control of the entire process—from project management to all types of fabrication and install all the way through to routine maintenance—all done by our full-time employees.” Sign Engineering also does most of its training in-house. When COVID-19 struck, Puerto Rico was one of the first and strictest governments in the United States to impose lock-
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Sign Builder Illustrated
down orders. Sign Engineering wanted to keep its employees “productive,” so Pedley purchased a company package of ISA’s online learning. “We started off thinking we were only going to do it for a few middle management-level employees,” Pedley said. “Then we ended up with about twenty-three employees in the program—from field supervisors to our Human Resources manager and vice president of Operations.” They are hoping to expand it even more in the future. They developed a “core curriculum” of approximately twenty of the seventy-five courses, covering a broad variety of topics that each Sign Engineering employee is required to complete prior to moving on to additional courses. After employees complete the core, they then begin to specialize in their area of expertise. After completing their specialty, they are free to take as many courses as they would like in whatever fields they choose.
November 2020
“The core curriculum helps each department better understand how the company should be operating as a whole. It also creates a better dynamic between employees since they better understand each other’s jobs,” said Pedley. To help with social distancing, the staff is rotating days in the office. As things return to normal, the plan is to have regular weekly roundtable discussions about each course so that employees can share what they’re learning. Already, though, Pedley has found dramatic improvement in developing a more common language of communication and an increased understanding of the overall process of the company. “The ISA program gives us the ability to provide a more formal education that, as a small company, we are not easily able to create on our own. It also gives us the ability to better cross train/expose employees to other areas of the company that they are not normally directly exsignshop.com
Photos: Shutterstock.com/Matej Kastelic.
Keeping employees productive through a curriculum.
