The Karins Way Program brings together diverse perspectives from across the company to innovate our global processes, ensure engineering integrity and cultivate relationships of trust with our clients.

We’ve heard time and time again that the service we deliver to our clients includes not only the engineering product, but also the customer experience we provide every day. No one knows that better than our company’s talented administration staff who all played a role in the program.

Meet Cyndy Jackson, Administrative Assistant at our Ft. Myers office. We recently spoke with her about how three heads are better than one and how she intends on giving clients a voice through her team’s innovations in the program.

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Tell us about collaborating with engineers in the company and what helped you get creative during the process.

I really liked the online collaboration tool that we used. I thought that was a pretty cool way to put all of our ideas out there because it's anonymous. You don't have to worry about whether or not your idea is going to please everyone or if it's going to be a hit out of the park every single time. It's more about trying to put out as many ideas as possible so we could grow and form them into something that is actually useful to work with.

Did your team work in silos after your initial brainstorming or keep collaborating on ideas throughout the process?

Once we actually generated the ideas, there was some confusion because three of us were working on similar solutions and we didn't realize it. Once we did, Andre from Ft. Lauderdale, Ryan from Sarasota, and I had our own communication via email. I think collaborating with each other created a better end result because we were able to compare what each of us had already made to generate more ideas. Working in pairs and groups made us stronger and more productive. I just like having more eyes on something. When you only have one person working on one thing, you can get stagnant without talking with other people.

Do you feel your teammates brought unexpected perspectives to the ideas?

Yeah, one idea we collaborated on was a survey and Ryan added a technical component to it. That was the one we decided would be the easiest out of all the options we were exploring, with each of us taking a different approach. In the end, I took my iteration and combined it with Ryan’s, and Andre's. I organized it and put in a couple of questions and suggestions to improve it. Everyone contributed and it was definitely helpful.

What is the end result that you want to see come out of your prototypes?

I would like to see the prototype that we each put time into actually benefit the company. It'd be great if we can see that get expanded on by the senior leaders as well and put it to use. I’d love to be sending that survey out to clients.

How do you see that specific idea benefiting your clients’ experiences?

I think it gives our clients a voice. It makes them a bit more heard, company wide. It makes it so that we can easily have discussions about what the client's particular needs are based on their survey. We can log the information for future use and everybody could have access to it, including all the engineers who go out to do site visits. We'll be on the same page with what we're doing with the product and the projects.

What is your definition of engineering integrity?

I think that it's having a whole team that focuses on client relationships and how we can improve them. That shows integrity right there. We're dedicating time, when money's not coming into the office, to have those meetings to focus in on what we can do to better. The fact that we have people on the team who work in all different areas of the company is also helpful because it includes everyone. It shows that integrity extends to everyone, beyond just the engineers who were actually out there meeting the clients. It’s about all of us.