We know a lot about what a great working environment is.
In a great working environment the mission is being accomplished and morale is high. It’s the “user” side of the two key leadership objectives: accomplish the mission and care for your people.
Most people know exactly what I mean by a great working environment. They may not be able to list characteristics, or point to research, but they’ve usually experienced one. So have you.
Think about a time in your life when it was great to come to work. If you’re lucky there are lots of them. If you’re really lucky, now is one of those times.
What was it like then? I’ll bet you were excited about the work you were doing, and you knew that it was appreciated. You almost certainly felt that you were being treated fairly and that you had some control over what you got to do.
There’s been quite a bit of formal research into the factors that make up a great working environment. Here’s a quick summary of what the research tells us make for a great working environment.
* Interesting and Meaningful Work
* Clear and Reasonable Expectations
* Frequent and Usable Feedback
* Fairness (Consequences = Performance)
* Consistency (Predictability)
* Maximum Control Possible Over Work Life
In my training classes, I often do an exercise where participants identify the times when they were in a great working environment and what that was like. The language is often a bit different from the formal research, but the same things come up over and over again.
Interesting and Meaningful Work
People want to do work that’s interesting and meaningful. They want what they do to be enriching for them and important to others.
Different people define interesting in different ways. For some people, it means that they’re learning a lot, having lots of personal growth. For others, the most important thing is that there are lots of different situations to deal with or lots of different problems to solve.
Sometimes “interesting” is not so much about the work itself as it is about the people you work with. This selffulfillment comes from being part of a team, an elite group, or just a bunch of folks you like working with.
It’s also important for the work to have value to others. The “others” can be the whole world, or just your customers or the people you work with.
Clear and Reasonable Expectations
People like to know what’s expected of them. They like to know the rules of the game.
Expectations need to be clear. At the supervisory level, that may mean laying out detailed, stepbystep procedures. At the management level expectations may come out of discussions with several people. At the leadership level, slogans and other brief statements that people can use as a “test” of their plans or actions are usually the most effective.
Don’t underestimate the values of frequency, simplicity, and memorability when you’re communicating expectations. You have to communicate the important things over and over in memorable terms.
In fact, repeating things is one way of telling people what’s important. Slogans are great for this. So are devices like pocket reminder cards with simple messages or messages in table form.
Use your regular forms of communication, like newsletters, emails, sales bulletins to reinforce your leadership message. Reinforce your written communications of expectations with oral communications. Reinforce your formal communications with informal ones.
Remember that you need to state expectations for the performance you want, but you also need to be clear about the consequences of performance that’s beyond or not quite up to standard.
Frequent and Usable Feedback
People like to know how they’re doing. Feedback is how they find out. To work, the feedback must be frequent (lots of small course corrections) and usable.
How frequent is frequent? The answer, which sounds something like a copout is: “As often as necessary?”
Some people want and need a lot of feedback. Other people prefer to be left alone most of the time to do their work. You have to know who needs what and in what situations.
The idea is to make lots of small course corrections on the way to the clear target you’ve established with your expectations. Lots of small adjustments are almost always easier and more effective then a few giant ones.
Feedback also has to be usable. Time your feedback so it reaches people when it is the most helpful. In most situations, that means you want feedback as close to the performance as possible. If you can set up a system so people can get their own feedback, so much the better.
Work on your communications skills so you deliver feedback in the most effective way possible. Learn about different ways that people process information, and match your communication to their preferred style. Learn about Social Styles and other ways that help you communicate with people in the ways they most like to be communicated with.
Fairness (Consequences = Performance)
People want to know that they (and others) are being fairly rewarded based on their performance. This is one of those words that requires definition. Otherwise, it becomes one of those words that everyone agrees with, but no two people have a common definition for.
For us, fairness means that the consequences of the performance are determined by the quantity and quality of the performance. One of the people in my class put it in almost Biblical terms: “The good shall be rewarded and the underachievers shall be punished in accordance with their results.”
This ties back to reasonable expectations. It depends on regular and usable feedback.
Consistency (Predictability)
Consistency means predictability. Subordinates want to know how their supervisor will react in a given situation. Consistency also relates to predictability in terms of performance.
Your people want to know how to predict your reaction in different situations. If they can’t, they worry about whether or not to trust you.
According to some management studies, consistency (predictability) is the single most effective standard to establish with your own leadership behavior. It’s actually another form of communication. It’s a way of walking the talk.
Leadership by example means that you act out the values and principles that you say you and others stand for. To quote Howell Raines on Bear Bryant: “Coach Bryant had an idea about how a man ought to act and if you watched him, you could figure out what it was.”
Leadership by example means that you consistently pay attention to the important things, consistently reward good performance, consistently see that rewards and punishments are meted out fairly.
Maximum Control Possible over Work Life
People want to have a say about things that affect their life. You can make that happen for them by giving them as much control as possible over issues that affect them at work.
Obviously that varies from person to person and situation to situation. Some people like to be left alone. Others want to see you frequently.
Some people are qualified to make lots of decisions about their work. Others need to develop their skills a bit before they can do the same.
Some people work hard and make an effort to do the job. Others slack off.
It’s probably a good general rule to allow individuals as much control of the basic decisions about their work as they are capable of handling and willing to handle. In today’s flatter organizations, this is easier to do from an organizational standpoint, but it’s hard for many of us from a personal standpoint.
Part of your job as a boss is to create a great working environment for the people who work for you. It’s not easy, but the result can be both high morale and high productivity.

A New Approach to Wastewater Disposal:
Cost-Effective Solutions for Non-Hazardous Industrial Wastewater Generators
Formed in 2005, NewStream is an environmental services company specializing in high technology industrial wastewater treatment and high purity process water. Originally built for Texas Instruments (TI), the facility has a treatment capacity of up to 800 gallons per minute of wastewater and the ability to deliver 325 gpm of high purity process water.
The founders of NewStream have transformed the former single-user facility (formerly Texas Instruments)into a successful commercial enterprise. Having received the first permit of its type ever to be issued in Massachusetts, NewStream now receives an average of 10 truckloads per day of non-hazardous wastewater from off-site sources. Additionally, the same network of pipelines that once allowed all of TI’s on-site manufacturing operations to send their wastewater to the plant now allows NewStream to treat wastewater from tenants on site.
As a result, the facility was able to maintain an on-site surface water discharge for the majority of its wastewater effluent under a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, meaning that water discharged from the facility will not harm even the most sensitive aquatic organism. With additional flows that discharged to the City of Attleboro sewer system under a pretreatment permit, the facility processed up to 0.75 MGD.
Sam Butterfield of Butterfield Environmental Corporation (BEC) in Plymouth, MA, then a supplier and consultant to TI and a veteran of the industrial wastewater industry in New England, saw an opportunity to grow his business and put the high-tech plant to good use. He joined forces with John Theriault, former Chief Operator of the treatment plant for TI, and now co-owner and VP of Operations for NewStream.
The path was clear that NewStream would have to work as a non-hazardous waste management and recycling facility, or not at all. However, since non-haz wastestreams are loosely tracked at best, and industry knowledge is closely guarded, concrete market data was practically impossible to obtain. Research was limited largely to anecdotal sources. Estimates of over-the-road non-haz wastewater volumes ranged from “not that much” to “huge”, and disposal pricing ranged from $0.05 to $1.25 per gallon. On the other hand, both present and potential generators of non-haz wastewater (and other, potentially recyclable, industrial/commercial materials) ranged wide and deep, all the way from large process industries to flooded basements and everything in between. With no way of quantifying just how much water there was or what NewStream’s market share could be, jumping into the market required a great leap of faith.
On the regulatory front, the Massachusetts DEP had no precedent for this type of permit since it was the first of its kind ever to be issued in the state, and MADEP’s interpretation differed from the EPA’s as to how the facility would be qualified. For example, was it a CWT (Centralized Waste Treatment) facility, and thereby allowed to accept waste from off-site sources, or not? The City of Attleboro also weighed in with a good deal of anxiety about what exactly qualifies as non-hazardous wastewater and how it would affect their own POTW.
Other questions included: Would existing technology and configuration of the plant be sufficient to treat the variety of waste streams that could potentially be received at the plant? Would it be feasible to separate the wastewater treatment plant from a site that had grown so organically over the years?
With many of these questions still unanswered, NewStream opened its doors – and its pipelines – to off-site wastewater in July of 2005 with the issuance of a new sewer discharge permit from the MADEP and the City of Attleboro.
Diversification
During the first full year of operation, several opportunities arose for NewStream to expand is service offerings. Most significant was utilizing the tremendous resources of the former TI environmental group for specialized environmental services such as decommissioning and decontaminating industrial facilities. A good deal of work was done for TI as it transitioned out of its manufacturing operations, as well as other companies who heard about NewStream’s expertise in these areas. Services have since been expanded to include contract operation of other industrial water and wastewater treatment facilities, chemical management and environmental monitoring.
Another addition to the service and product line was antifreeze recycling. As a non-haz material, NewStream could accept used antifreeze, collected in small bulk from auto dealerships, service centers and fleet vehicles, process it to recover ethylene glycol, and produce a recycled anti-freeze product for sale back into the automotive market. Rather than investing large capital expenditures for new equipment, NewStream was able to convert one of its three large and sophisticated Reverse Osmosis (RO) units from the plant’s high purity water process into a nano-filter for glycol recovery. The addition of a small Ion Exchange system for chloride removal was all that was needed to allow NewStream to recover a high quality recycled product from the used material.
The recovered product is then refreshed with virgin ethylene glycol, corrosion inhibitors, and dye packages to meet customer specifications. The recycled antifreeze can be shipped from NewStream in bulk or drums at very competitive prices.
NewStream’s goal is to generate recycled material that is as high quality as virgin material. The recycled material can be sold back to the generator and/or to third parties for re-use in applications such as:
• Major auto and truck manufacturing
• Aftermarket automotive service
• Consumer use (retail)
• Fed, state, local government use
• Military applications
Other processes on the drawing board include recovery of clean “Specification Used Oil Fuel” (a “regulated recyclable” material under Mass regulations) from water-contaminated tank bottoms and the like, recovery of recyclable gasoline from gas/water mixtures, and recovery of oil and recyclable metals from used oil filters.
Process Challenges and Modifications
Once the permits were in place, the word was out and the water started flowing in, many challenges still remained. The naïve assumption was that since this sophisticated plant, with all its technology, could treat almost any type of hazardous wastewater, any non-hazardous wastewater would be handled with ease. That was not the case: the NewStream team was surprised at the diversity and complexity of the waste streams that were coming in, and by the high volume of high-strength organic wastestreams. Many streams, such as latex waste from the textile industry, had peculiar characteristics that demanded special processing. Others came with odor problems. All streams had to be screened carefully for hidden toxicity characteristics that might pass through to the POTW.
NewStream quickly began a series of process modifications that would allow for optimum efficiency and treatment performance in the plant. The most significant improvement was the addition of eight 10,000-gallon holding tanks. The tank farm enables the Company to isolate, analyze and batch treat each individual waste stream as it comes off the truck.
The primary advantage to the tank farm system is the guarantee that each and every load arriving at the plant will receive optimum pre-treatment to remove a large bulk of contaminants prior to being equalized with other waste streams. The tank farm allows for greater cost efficiency and in general, better control of the treatment process.
Each new waste stream coming into the plant now receives its own unique treatment recipe. The recipe goes on record in a sort of operators’ cookbook, which is followed each time a load of the given stream comes in. Ultimately, the batch treatment process will be automated, allowing operators to plug in a waste profile number to the programmable logic controller (PLC) and automatically treat the entire batch. This method will eliminate operator error and provide for better control over chemical dosage rates, mixing speeds and times.
Automated batch treatment works with a variety of different treatment processes, including gravity clarification, chemical oxidation, dissolved air flotation and even biological treatment methods, such as a moving bed bio-reactor (MBBR).
The MBBR is another new technology that NewStream expects to put online in 2007. (At this writing, a pilot-scale system is being successfully operated at the plant.) The bioreactor will enable NewStream to treat waste streams with high biological oxygen demand (BOD) by converting contaminants into organic mass and gases.
Specifically, the MBBR technology being tested at NewStream uses thousands of biofilm carriers operating in mixed motion to increase the surface area for attached fixed film bacteria. The system offers higher productivity than many other biological systems in use today.
WEF 6/8/2007 6 Cost Effective Solutions for Non-Hazardous Industrial Wastewater
Other process modifications included retrofitting the existing reverse osmosis (RO) unit as mentioned above in the discussion about antifreeze recycling, and converting two 10,000-gallon tanks for removal of any non-emulsified oil and grease prior to chemical treatment.
Quality Control
In order to maintain the high standards of treatment expected of NewStream, strict quality control has been critical. Before accepting any waste stream, NewStream’s Quality Control Manager performs extensive treatability testing to:
1. Pre-screen incoming wastestreams to establish influent levels of several contaminants, including metals – utilizing a direct coupling plasma (DCP) unit – as well as COD, TSS, and pH.
2. Determine whether the stream can be treated effectively enough to meet NewStream’s discharge permit limits, and
3. Establish a treatment “recipe” for each stream to be optimally batch treated (as discussed above).
Once accepted for processing at the facility, QC must be maintained throughout receiving, treatment and discharge processes. This is accomplished with the use of a Receiving Log that travels with the retain sample and the load itself through the process, getting multiple QC checks at critical points along the way, until it is finally cleared for discharge from the plant.
A COST COMPARISON
So, when does it make sense for a non-hazardous industrial wastewater generator to truck their water off site to NewStream, as opposed to building and operating their own on-site wastewater treatment plant?
An example: NewStream has a customer that manufactures several different health and beauty products. Upon introducing a new product line, the company was notified that they were now in violation of their existing sewer discharge permit. The process associated with manufacturing the new product was generating wastewater that added several new contaminants to the stream.
The company considered a complete overhaul of their existing treatment system in order to treat the wastewater generated from the new process. To do everything required to meet permit limits, the capital costs would have been $540,000. O&M costs for the system were estimated at $125,000 per year, not including sewer discharge fees. The cost to haul one truckload of wastewater per week to NewStream is $104,000 per year. In this case, the cost-benefit is clearly in favor of trucking, especially since the success of the new product line was not yet known and the company was hesitant to make the long-term investment in waste treatment equipment.

Although there are almost political cartoons in the newspapers, election years will always show an increase in political cartoons. Whether it’s just ordinary satire or construed to make fun of the current political leaders is difficult to assess, but there is no doubt that you will often see a political cartoon in the newspaper several times a week in the months preceding a new presidential election. Doonesbury has always been somewhat of a political cartoon, but election years will show a variety of other political cartoons as well.

 

How popular political cartoons really are depends where you live and the social standing of the populace. Most people don’t find political cartoons funny, so they tend to avoid them. Of course, if you live in an area where politics is wide spread, more people will read the political cartoons and actually derive pleasure from reading them. Political cartoons usually appeal to those people who have a difficult time enjoying anything that is funny. It appears those who have a more serious nature tend to be more drawn to political cartoons—at least that is how it appears to be on the surface. This may not be true of everyone, but it does appear to be a general rule of thumb. Also, those who do not involve themselves too much in politics seem to enjoy the satire of political cartoons more, especially if the political cartoon for that day is directed toward a political figure of the opposite party affiliation.

 

Whether the above observations are valid or not is probably contingent upon the locations of the cartoons’ publication. Some people may even be offended by the satire in political cartoons, so there is no hard and fast rule about who will derive pleasure from reading political cartoons. Cartoon Bank has decades of political cartoons for your viewing pleasure.