The Po’okela Award – Living Our Core Values
Each month, our staff nominates their co-workers who best exemplify SSFM’s core values – integrity, progressiveness, customer focus and nurturing. They are honored with the coveted Po’okela award. In the midst of Covid-19, we are honoring our team members who have proven invaluable to our work-from-home transition and to ensuring SSFM projects continue seamlessly.
Jesse Talbo, Vera Tong, Chad Honda, William Ancheta
SSFM Information Technology
While the rest of us were trying to figure out how to deal with working remotely, stocking up food supplies, arranging for our kids that could no longer go to school, creating desks out of surfboards and the like – our IT team were doing the same for their families – and then some! At the very beginning of the work-from-home decision, in the middle of our emails, calls and texts asking for urgent IT support and scaling up SSFM’s IT systems to handle so many of us working remotely across the Pacific Rim , SSFM’s Honolulu Office was FLOODING!
Two days of torrential rains were repeatedly soaking our IT team. Through it all they continued to help each of us, step-by-step, item-by-item, as if they were comfortably sitting warm and dry in the office. Soaked from cleaning up the mess in the office and from standing in the wind-blown rain each time the trash bins filled with water needed dumping from the second-floor balcony.
And then the mopping would start all over again. While helping us solve our software, hardware and network connectivity troubles with a smile, Jesse was literally hanging from the trusses in our office with a harness installing MacGyver-like solutions to control the downpour flowing across the office floor.
With garbage bags in-place like tarps along the ceiling, taped together into makeshift water troughs, and jury-rigged garden hose downspouts that ran out the back door, debris from the flooded roof began plugging up the hoses and the garbage started to bulge with an impending look of a catastrophe. Water would be everywhere … AGAIN!
That didn’t stop our calm, cool, intrepid, and soaked IT team. They figured out how to snake and unplug the garden hoses using IT installation equipment poles. Catastrophe averted. Along the way, others jumped in to help. IT ended up adopting Corey as an honorary member when he camped out in the Earth Booth overnight to keep an ever-watchful eye on their Rube Goldberg drainage set-up.
Sonya Koki, Darilyn Lum
SSFM Human Resources
With the Novel Coronavirus threat to the Islands there was no time to waste. Sonya and Darilyn jumped in to plan how to best address the pandemic from HR’s perspective, all while covering their normal responsibilities.
Questions of how to best protect our staff? What would the staff need? What sources for Coronavirus health data would prove to be reliable? If the crisis worsened, how would we reach everyone quickly? How would we separate facts from opinions with information changing daily? What policies and procedures were necessary to ensure everyone’s health and safety? What policies were needed to guide the staff in how to work from home? And many more.
Sonya and Darilyn worked tirelessly to stay informed, keep us informed and remain ahead of the evolving crisis, with information changing by the minute, staying abreast of regional emergency orders and legislation being passed that could impact SSFM and its employees.
From the onset, emergency communication systems were developed, implemented, tested and successfully broadcast to all SSFM offices. At our Monday check-ins, they initiated health polling and continue to monitor to assure SSFM does its best to protect everyone from the risks of exposure. They quickly drafted and communicated HR policies that protect everyone.
All the good work isn’t done yet. Our HR team is working on preparations for our safe return to our offices. When it really matters, it’s comforting to know that that the right people with the right skills are in the right positions. Kudos to our HR team!
The Po’okela Award – Living Our Core Values
Jesse Talbo, Vera Tong, Chad Honda, William Ancheta
SSFM Information Technology
While the rest of us were trying to figure out how to deal with working remotely, stocking up food supplies, arranging for our kids that could no longer go to school, creating desks out of surfboards and the like – our IT team were doing the same for their families – and then some! At the very beginning of the work-from-home decision, in the middle of our emails, calls and texts asking for urgent IT support and scaling up SSFM’s IT systems to handle so many of us working remotely across the Pacific Rim , SSFM’s Honolulu Office was FLOODING!
Two days of torrential rains were repeatedly soaking our IT team. Through it all they continued to help each of us, step-by-step, item-by-item, as if they were comfortably sitting warm and dry in the office. Soaked from cleaning up the mess in the office and from standing in the wind-blown rain each time the trash bins filled with water needed dumping from the second-floor balcony.
And then the mopping would start all over again. While helping us solve our software, hardware and network connectivity troubles with a smile, Jesse was literally hanging from the trusses in our office with a harness installing MacGyver-like solutions to control the downpour flowing across the office floor.
With garbage bags in-place like tarps along the ceiling, taped together into makeshift water troughs, and jury-rigged garden hose downspouts that ran out the back door, debris from the flooded roof began plugging up the hoses and the garbage started to bulge with an impending look of a catastrophe. Water would be everywhere … AGAIN!
That didn’t stop our calm, cool, intrepid, and soaked IT team. They figured out how to snake and unplug the garden hoses using IT installation equipment poles. Catastrophe averted. Along the way, others jumped in to help. IT ended up adopting Corey as an honorary member when he camped out in the Earth Booth overnight to keep an ever-watchful eye on their Rube Goldberg drainage set-up.
Sonya Koki, Darilyn Lum
SSFM Human Resources
With the Novel Coronavirus threat to the Islands there was no time to waste. Sonya and Darilyn jumped in to plan how to best address the pandemic from HR’s perspective, all while covering their normal responsibilities.
Questions of how to best protect our staff? What would the staff need? What sources for Coronavirus health data would prove to be reliable? If the crisis worsened, how would we reach everyone quickly? How would we separate facts from opinions with information changing daily? What policies and procedures were necessary to ensure everyone’s health and safety? What policies were needed to guide the staff in how to work from home? And many more.
Sonya and Darilyn worked tirelessly to stay informed, keep us informed and remain ahead of the evolving crisis, with information changing by the minute, staying abreast of regional emergency orders and legislation being passed that could impact SSFM and its employees.
From the onset, emergency communication systems were developed, implemented, tested and successfully broadcast to all SSFM offices. At our Monday check-ins, they initiated health polling and continue to monitor to assure SSFM does its best to protect everyone from the risks of exposure. They quickly drafted and communicated HR policies that protect everyone.
All the good work isn’t done yet. Our HR team is working on preparations for our safe return to our offices. When it really matters, it’s comforting to know that that the right people with the right skills are in the right positions. Kudos to our HR team!