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The Importance of Workforce Development... continued from previous page
If an employee wants to be a licensed surveyor, have them start with CST level one and then work their way up.

Salary is always a great motivator. You can provide employees with six-month goals that are tied to $2/hour incremental raises, for instance.
Inspiring stories can also help them understand the type of career change that is possible—such as how you went from $5.25 per hour
to owning a land surveying business by doggedly setting your own goals and pursuing them.
Create Feedback Loops

Understanding how they are performing in real-time each day can also help
employees improve their skills and analytical thinking.

How often are you taking the time to provide feedback on daily performance?
When you ignore the same small errors over and over, you do a disservice to your
employees versus when you constructively take time to call them out.

For example, one surveying company found that their engineers would tend to
design things that didn’t make a lot of sense when they were staked out on the
ground. So they started doing something new: when a new job would come in
for the field grew to tackle, they would identify the engineer who designed it and
bring him or her to the job site. Then, they would have the engineer personally
stake it out—in this case in the 105-degree Fresno heat.
When wondering why the staking was so hard, it would become clear to the engineer that their design needed to be improved. Thanks
to the job-site feedback, the next design was much better, and the one after that was even more improved.
This type of educational feedback helps employees understand not just what they need to do, but why. It empowers them to take on the
next project with more confidence, anticipate the needs of the client and their teammates, and provide a better internal product overall.
Consider starting by having your field staff come into the office to draft up the topos that they just shot, in order to improve the way
the field staff operates for the benefit of the office staff. It will make employees do better in the field by helping them understand what,
why, and how they’re shooting certain things.
Learning from mistakes is critical and will help employees understand how to make the right decisions and avoid the wrong ones—
avoiding potentially costly mistakes in the process.
Hone Communication Skills

An underrated skill that you can encourage employees to develop
are communication skills. In many instances, the very first contact
that landowners have within a given project is with the Surveyor. If
communication starts off on a sour note, the chances are that interaction
will impact the whole project.

Good communication doesn’t mean that you need to know everything about
every project. It just requires a general level of good articulation so that you
represent your firm and profession well.
One Surveyor told a story of a staking project that was intended to lay out
alternatives routes to a proposed highway project. The final route had been
decided but mapping out alternatives was a requirement. A landowner
saw the staking in action and came out of their home to ask what the
surveyors were doing. One of them said, “we’re doing survey work for a
highway project that is going through here. Which house is yours?” He told
the homeowner that the centerline of the highway was going to go right
through their property.
While most examples of poor communication aren’t so severe, it’s clear that coaching on communication is valuable.

Another surveyor who worked for BLM described how the senior Surveyor he was working under was instructing him on how to talk to
public landowners. The older Surveyor would explain in detail why he approached conversations with landowners in specific ways. Then,
when the younger Surveyor was out on his own talking to prickly landowners, he was able to be deliberate and thoughtful about how he
explained things to them.
Honing communication skills can take the form of mentoring, but you can also encourage public speaking training such as Toastmasters.
If you want to set a positive example, down be afraid to jump in by enrolling yourself. One Surveyor signed up for a 4-week boot camp
in order to set an example for his staff. Even more mature professionals can benefit from going out of their comfort zone and facing the
critiques of programs like Toastmasters.
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28 The Nevada Traverse Vol.49, No.2, 2022