Cambrex SMART Day builds camaraderie – and birdhouses

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Youth Enrichment Center at the Floyd County Fairgrounds was filled to capacity Friday as several hundred Cambrex employees gathered for SMART Day.

“SMART stands for Safety, Morale, Attitude, Respect and Teamwork,” said Joe Nettleton, Cambrex vice president of operations and general manager of Cambrex Charles City.

“We actually started it probably 15 years ago, and it was an annual event,” he said. “We focused on safety, initially, and then we expanded it into quality and then we expanded into culture. At that point we realized it was no longer just safety days, and in kind of a friendly competition among employees we said, ‘We need a moniker,’ and one of our folks in maintenance came up with SMART Day.”

Nettleton said the event stopped when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and this is the first year it has been back since then.

He said restarting SMART has been a priority for him, “because it is an incredible opportunity for us to just engage in dialogue with people who don’t normally get to interact with each other, because we have so many different functions at the sites, so many shifts.”

The full day of activities included lunch, snacks, refreshments and hors d’oeuvres; several speakers; a forum for open discussion and questions and answers; department breakouts; and a team-building exercise that involved actual building.

The hall was full of the clamor of hundreds of nails being hammered in at one point in the afternoon as teams of employees built birdhouses to be given to Floyd County Conservation.

More than one person commented that it sounded like Santa’s Workshop in the big fairgrounds building, and for bluebirds and woods ducks in the county it probably was.

Scott Niles, maintenance superintendent at Cambrex Charles City, said Nettleton said he wanted an activity that would result in something to give back to the community.

“I work with TLC and I also work with the (Floyd County) museum and Floyd County Conservation, and I called them and I said, ‘Do you need 400 of anything?’” Niles said.

They all said they didn’t need 400 of anything the group could build, but the Conservation Department said they could use a hundred birdhouses, “and that’s what started the conversation,” he said.

They eventually agreed to build 100 bluebird houses and 100 wood duck houses to be given to Floyd County Conservation to distribute in the county.

“I didn’t even know what wood ducks looked like before this,” Niles said.

Wood was procured from Superior Lumber, maintenance staff cut it to the proper dimensions then shrink-wrapped it along with nails and instructions, and the bundles were passed out at the START event. Every worker also got a home toolkit with the Cambrex logo that they could keep and that they used to build the birdhouses.

At the end of the team building session there were 200 new birdhouses ready to be delivered, in varying degrees of excellence.

“They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be waterproof. They’re going outside,” Niles said, laughing about one box he had seen that was put together completely differently than the instructions showed.

Nettleton said there were also several great speakers during the day.

One was a person from Orlando who is involved in the Disney experience and gave a talk on “Lessons from the Mouse,” he said.

“It was about how do you ensure the customer has the best experience, and how do you look at things through the lens of the customer versus your own personal lens. You do that by creating little moments of ‘Wow!’ That’s something that anybody can do,” Nettleton said.

Another speaker, who had been a Cambrex customer and is now part of the Cambrex leadership team, “has seen both sides of Cambrex,” Nettleton said. “As Disney would say, he’s seen the onstage presentation as the customer, and now he’s backstage and under the stage and seeing all the things we do to make sure it’s a seamless approach and respective of the customer.”

The group also had a session by Covenant Workplace Solutions on “Practicing Compassion Toward Others in the Workforce.”

Nettleton said that, perhaps most importantly, the day gave people a chance to talk and get to know each other. With a company as large as Cambrex, people don’t often get a chance to meet people from other departments. Or some people might be working in the same department or in the same lab, but never meet because they work different shifts, he said.

“And so it gives you a chance to kind of collaborate and just interact with the others in your group, and maybe share opportunities to seek for improvement, or share frustrations and get those bubbled up into the management group, into the department leads so that we can try to resolve some of those and increase job satisfaction,” Nettleton said.

“At the end of the day we’re going to have a party and we’re going to celebrate the success of Cambrex.”