Nocita:
I work for an engineering environmental firm S&ME Inc., and I am
an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida.
Charbonneau:
When did you start each of those positions with your organizations?
Nocita:
I have been at S&ME since 2007. 2015 was when I went back to USF because
I had an earlier association there. I was a professor there in the 80s
and early 90s and then moved into consulting in the early 90s, I am
currently semi-retired from the consulting business.
Charbonneau:
Can you explain your leadership role at S&ME?
Nocita:
I have no leadership role currently as a semi-retired person, but in
terms of just a title I was a principal in the company, a principal
geologist. Then I was a department manager. I was the department manager
for several years. Then during COVID, I transitioned out of that, but I
stayed to mentor the younger gentleman that took over the managerial
position. I was like the co-manager because I was in that transition of
moving into retirement in 2022.
It was agreed by everybody involved that I would just help as needed
with that managerial role as this other person moved into that role,
which he is completely ensconced in now. He is the department manager
now.
Charbonneau:
Since you officially retired in 2022, how long was that transitioning
with that other individual for him to take the reins?
Nocita:
A year full-time where he and I consulted a lot about things because
there is a lot going on in the administrative side of being the
department manager, which he was not familiar with. Before that, he was
doing just technical work. Then it just phased out whereas he grew more
skillful and comfortable with the job, I did less and less to the point
where unless I was asked by him: “Hey, can you help me with this, or do
you want to be involved in that,” I was just doing my work and that went
on for about another year.
When I was a professor, I really did not have a leadership role. I did
all the things you typically do. I was on a university committee, but I
was not a in a leadership role. So, the answer is nothing. I have no
role. My retirement was at the end of May of this year, so it was just
three months ago.
Charbonneau:
What were the significant impacts or substantial changes you noticed
over the pandemic?
Nocita:
I will preface by saying that our company was fortunate. When everything
really happened in the spring of 2020 and offices shut down, shut down
in the sense that people were not coming into whatever office it might
be, our company was appointed an essential service. We never stopped
working. What happened initially was everybody had to work at home. That
was March of 2020
I know one of the questions that I am going to go ahead and answer now
that is in your list is about retention of employees, layoffs, that type
of thing. Extraordinarily little of that, nothing that affected my
office. I am going to digress a little bit here again to give you some
context. My company is headquartered in Raleigh, NC.
We have about 1100 people and 31 or 32 offices, something like that
throughout the Southeast, from Ohio down through Tennessee, Kentucky,
the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida just has a couple of
offices. We are out on the on the outskirts and the company is diverse.
It has a lot of different service areas I work in what is called the
“Environmental Service” area, but there are construction services, there
is geotechnical services, there is energy, there is transportation and
several others. My knowledge is mostly about my service area and my
office in Florida. Nobody got laid off in my department.
I heard companywide the layoffs were minimal, 20 or 30 people. I think
field technicians because in some states where we had a lot of work
related to whatever State Department of Transportation, Florida DOT, or
North Carolina DOT, a lot of contracts were at once put on hold.
We do a lot of dot work in other states, and we are not so much in
Florida. If that work goes away, you cannot support the people going out
daily. That is where the layoffs were exclusively with field people.
There was a couple of office consolidations where a given city had two
or three offices and it was considered financially beneficial to get rid
of 1 physical office. Combine everybody into whatever stays and that
sometimes led to one or two people being laid off.
I do not think anybody in any department in my office, which is about 30
people total, I do not recall that anybody got laid off related to
COVID. We stayed steady with our work, which was fortunate.
Charbonneau:
How long were people working at home before people started returning to
your office in any role? What was the timeline of that?
Nocita:
My recollection is that sometime in the summer, 3-5 months after the
start of the pandemic, it became a choice. Everybody in my department,
which is small in my office, we have a total of between the more senior
people that are mostly in the office and folks that are mostly in the
field and then mid, mid-level people that still do a bit of both, we
have about 8 or 9 people.
Everybody started going back to the office. I prefer the office
environment because I like all the resources. I like having the ability
to walk across the hall to talk to somebody about something. I did not
like working at home every day.
Working at home used to be a little bit of a treat where I would decide:
“OK, it is Friday. I got lots of stuff I can do at home. I will stay
home,” and it was fun. It became not fun very quickly to work at home
every day.
But there are still people that would go weeks and weeks, and I would
not see them. Then they pop in for a day or something like that. There
are people that prefer the home environment. The company has made it
plain that if you are productive and doing all the things that you are
expected to do, and in my world that is lots of billable time and
business development, all the things that go along with being a
consultant. If you are meeting your goals while you are working
remotely, they do not really care.
The bigger issue that comes up and you are hearing this from people I
was talking to, we had a little geology alumni society networking event
last night and I was talking to one of the professors there and he said
he is teaching in person for the first time in two years this semester.
He prefers the remote teaching. He says a lot of people stopped coming
to the campus. That is a different discussion that we can touch on, but
the question then becomes: OK, if you have X number of people that
hardly ever come into the office, how much of this office space do are
we paying for that is empty?
We are not really dealing with that too much because we are still hiring
people and we are busting out at the seams right now in my office, which
is a good thing. During a meeting I was at in the summer at a
conference, I was talking to a woman, and she said one of her offices
had no one on a floor. Her company had three floors in a building, and
they had to completely take one floor away because, so few people were
coming in. That type of thing.
That directive has never come down where we expect you to be in the
office. I know another friend of mine that does the exact same kind of
work for a much bigger firm, international firm, he has not been in the
office in his office since March of 2020.
He has a nice office at home, he prefers it. He can do all his work and
he is looking to retire in March, and he said: “I am never going back to
my office again.”
I find it much less enjoyable to try to do my job like this. Like you
and I are doing right now where this is how I talk to people, and I just
do not have all the office resources available to me. Even as simple as
printing out copies of things and stuff like that. People are different.
But again, if your bosses think you are doing an excellent job, that is
all that matters.
After talking with the Chuck Connor last night, who is a professor at
USF, a whole lot of people are going to want to continue to stay working
remotely. I do not know. The whole teaching thing to me is just so much
better in person.
We can talk a bit about how my wife is a schoolteacher and when that hit
the fan in March of 2020, she was downstairs at the dining room trying
to teach 5th graders. I was upstairs in a room with the door shut. Not
because she was making a lot of noise, but she is talking, and I am
trying to work and do my thing. She just hated that remote teaching
without having her kids in front of her.
Charbonneau:
Did S&ME implement any types of supports to help people adjust to the
pandemic? How did you stay connected and keep up communication during
the pandemic?
Nocita:
I had implemented weekly, what I called workload meetings, where we met
once a week, looked at our calendar, which everybody put everything in.
This included field work or whatever you are doing, and that is easy
enough to do remotely.
Everybody was available to meet online, and we can talk once business is
done. We can talk about whatever we want to talk about. The company was
well prepared for the pandemic without even knowing that they were
prepared for the pandemic they had recently gone digital. All company
files are in the cloud now and that move had started and was already in
place before 2020. Prior to that, every office had its own server. Then
you were connected in Raleigh, it was a mess because when things went
down, you could not get to what you needed to get too etcetera.
Everybody has a laptop. That is the standard computer issued to anyone.
Everybody had the capability to take their computer home and prior to
that, you just went into work by way of a VPN. Now when I turn my
computer on, I am hooked into all my company's files. I do not have to
log into anything except for the accounting software. If I want to get
into that for invoicing and stuff like that, I must log in. Other than
that, I can go into file explorer and just go to a file and open it up
and I am working out of the cloud.
They were well prepared for remote work without knowing they had
prepared for it. We have been using Teams. We started with Skype like a
lot of people, I think we had already moved to Teams, which is I think a
better platform for what you and I are doing right now, this type of
thing. It was an easy transition to. Nobody can come into the office
until further notice. Go in, get what you need and get out.
For teaching it was not good. It was the middle of the semester. I only
teach two classes, one graduate class in the fall and it is a small
class. It caps out at 10, so there are usually 6 or 7 students. Then in
the spring, it is an undergraduate class. That can have 30 plus people
in it. That was the class I was in when everything happened in March,
and everything moved to online.
The university did not have Teams. They had Zoom, but I got someone
through the library that I knew to help me with something called
Collaboration. It was a mess because I could not have all the students
in front of me with their videos. It would crash with too many people
trying to push video through, so I finished out the semester without
even seeing people. It is an interactive class where I bring in each
week professional people to talk to the students about what they do. So,
they are trying to come in via this collaboration software and it was
horrible.
The fall semester was also online, but it was only six or seven people.
It was just OK. But that is one where I do most of the lecturing, but I
also bring in some people to talk about what to expect when you are out
there working as a professional geoscientist. The following spring 2021,
I had what is called a hybrid class. I went to the campus, I had about
eight students physically in front of me and the rest of them online.
That was a semi disaster too. It was technically challenging. They gave
me a TA, which normally I would not need, just to make sure that at the
start of each class everything was working with all the computers and
that the students could hear me who were online and see me.
We had problems with the video feed. There was one night, nothing
worked, and we just had no class. Those 2-3 semesters of full remote and
then one which was the hybrid did not work well for me. What I have
heard though, and I saw all the emails flying around, imagine normally
having a class that has a lab where you are using a microscope. Those
poor guys and or people, the professors had to produce so many
innovative ways of trying to effectively teach their classes.
My problems were minimal compared to theirs. Then that for summer we run
a field camp out in Idaho. They did what they called analytical field
camps and they were all computer stuff. They had to produce exercises
and so on.
My university experience is very narrow because I just do those two
classes and I am not a full-time faculty. I am sure you have gotten all
kinds of interesting stories from full-time faculty about how they had
to switch midstream and try to produce ways of finishing our classes or
teaching a new class in the fall of 2020 that normally has all these
labs where you are looking at rocks you or are looking at thin sections.
I just do not think that would have been good for the students. It
cannot have been as effective.
Charbonneau:
Are they back to all in person classes? Do they still have hybrid
classes?
Nocita:
Everybody can come back. The spring of 2021 was the hybrid class. The
fall of 2021, which was a year ago, I taught my class in person. It was
my choice. Again, it was this small graduate class. Everyone could
choose to have their class in person, but I think students could still
opt to attend remotely. I do not know how that worked. Luckily, I had a
small class on the first night we met, and we agreed we are not doing
remote. Everybody was on board.
Even simple things like: “Is everybody cool if we just sit spread out,
but we do not wear a mask so that we can be comfortable,” because it is
a one night a week for three hours. It is a long time to sit there. I
was fortunate. In this past spring, it was just a normal class for me
with my bigger undergraduate class. Fall of 2021 is when the university
said everybody can come back as you choose. But again, I am thinking
about the gentleman I talked with last night, he teaches Computational
Geology. It is a whole lot of math and computer programming. He said it
works better remotely. So, he will go back to doing it remotely.
Whereas for mineralogy you are showing a picture. You must produce a way
of rotating the stage so you can see how the polarized light affects the
crystal and the colors and all of this. I do not know if they made their
own little videos if they found them online. I am sure there was a big
jump in teaching tools that companies produced to push out to professors
for that type of thing. But I am guessing about that.
Charbonneau:
What is the status of the field camp in Idaho?
Nocita:
It was this past summer and I know we are in the process that USF is
setting up a permanent field camp out in Idaho. They bought the land a
few years ago. I just found out last night that the well is installed to
supply water and the electricity is ready. They are going to hopefully
bring in some modular units before the permanent buildings are built for
bathrooms and a classroom.
Kids next summer will still be sleeping in tents, which is what they
have been doing. They will have permanent structures for bathrooms and
showers, and a place to get together, and meet and work. Then there is
fundraising, which is slowing it down. I am involved with the alumni
society to help with that. But it was back to in person this past
summer.
Charbonneau:
Did you make any kind of accommodations to keep moving students along
during the pandemic? Did USF change any of their academic policies?
Nocita:
I never saw anything in my limited sphere that showed requirements had
been adjusted in some fashion. I never saw anything move to pass fail.
What I did see that I have not ever seen before is what is called an
accommodation. A student gets an accommodation related to something. It
can be a physical disability or whatever the accommodation is.
Accommodations went up and what I saw was they were for undergraduates.
None of my graduate students had any accommodations, but they were
related to what I would just generally call mental health.
It was stress related. I saw a whole lot of university=wide emails that
would talk about seeing students that are struggling because of the
pandemic. The stress is related to either not being able to go in or
they do not want to come into the to a classroom because they are still
fearful. There was a lot of that, and that is still ongoing.
The whole mask wearing thing is now optional. If anybody wants to wear a
mask, they can. But a professor does not have to, nor does a student at
this point.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice now that students are coming back in person, were there
any skill gaps that you notice they had which were caused by the
pandemic?
Nocita:
I have not noticed that, but again, I have such a limited experience
there on a semester-by-semester basis. Yes, that is not something I have
seen. I think your earlier question that I included in addition to any
changes that might have been related to grading and stuff like that had
to do with just progress. I noticed again with undergraduates, that
students have talked to me about how they dropped out for a semester
because of the pandemic. There has been an effect. I suspect you have
gotten more data from a full-time professor about that, but my guess is
that there is an uptick in extending the amount of time it takes for
people to finish their degree.
Charbonneau:
At USF did the enrollment change significantly from your time there or
did it stay consistent?
Nocita:
I do not have any data about that. I just do not know anything about it.
The only thing I can comment on is that my classes stayed about the
same. I never heard anything or saw anything related to core classes
being deflected for a year or anything that might have showed that was
happening or that general enrollment was down.
I think the geology program, just an anecdotal observation from this
little networking event, which is both graduate students and
undergraduate students, last night I hardly knew anybody there. I say
that as a good thing. It was full of what I perceived to be a lot of
undergraduates. I say that based mainly because they look incredibly
young, but there were 50 students at this event.
We have a highly active geology alumni society that I have been involved
with for 15 years, but I am getting ready to drop from that. I am I am
getting tired of doing it, but it is a particularly good thing. It helps
students in diverse ways, and that is outside the scope of what you and
I are talking about. But this was a very well attended event last night.
It is in part advertised as a networking event for students to get to
talk to people and I had several students that I did not know come up
and talk to me about my class in the spring. They wanted to know more
about it, that type of thing. From that standpoint the geology
department is extremely healthy.
Charbonneau:
How did the pandemic impact your productivity levels at S&ME?
Nocita:
The outlook is particularly good right now. The company is slightly
ahead of what would be called the plan. There is a plan that has a
certain amount of profit, a certain amount of revenue and it is just a
graph. It gets posted once a month once all the invoicing is done. It is
basic finance stuff, and we worked on a four-week period, but now we
work on 12 periods, so eight 4-week and four 5-week periods to complete
a year. We are moving into period 9 I guess, or we are in period 9, but
nonetheless, we are slightly ahead of the plan and doing well. My
department is looking to hire a young geologist right now because we
have plenty of work. I mentioned earlier that there is a huge push in a
lot of work that is happening for the transportation sector service area
in my office, and they just keep hiring more engineers. We have no more
office space right now. So that is all a good thing.
We fared OK through the worst of it. We never lost money in the sense
that at the end of the year, we did not make as much money as the plan,
in terms of profit and revenue, but we did not lose money. From that
standpoint, it is a good thing. The company weathered that storm well.
Charbonneau:
Do you currently have any workplace restrictions in place?
Nocita:
No restrictions.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice any changes in your staffing levels due to the pandemic?
Nocita:
There would be companywide announcements for certain people that retire,
that had been there with the company for 35 years or something like
that. But for instance, there was no announcement companywide when I
retired. Other than the people that I know in other offices, they would
have no idea. Plus, I still show up as an employee. I got an e-mail from
a guy the other day. I have done a lot of work in a certain area; he
knew that he was posing a technical question to me. I almost wanted to
reply that I am not really working much anymore. The only work I do is
if I have some billable work to do.
I review reports and do other things as needed, but nonetheless my sense
would be that the pandemic, if it pushed people into retirement, it was
very minimal. There may have been a few people that and I can think of 1
gentleman. He worked up in South Carolina and he was a big wig. He was
like a vice president. It came as a little bit of a of a surprise. It
was year ago now, in July.
My guess is that he had a retirement date of say 2 or 3 years from then
and he just decided: “You know what, this is all gotten so weird. I do
not need to keep working. I am fine. I am going to go ahead and retire
now.” I think maybe a few people might have accelerated their retirement
by 1-3 years. My plan never changed. I was always on a certain target.
I never heard anything about the company wanting people to retire by way
of incentives. It was just the opposite. They wanted to keep the brain
trust there.
Charbonneau:
What backgrounds and skills do you look for in the individuals you hire?
Has that skillset changed due to the pandemic?
Nocita:
When we hire a young geologist, somebody to come in at the staff level
the, the intro level, there is an expectation that they have a certain
amount of geologic knowledge because they have a geology degree. We do
not necessarily probe that all that much because, as with many jobs,
what they are going to do at a company like mine, we must teach them how
to do it. We must teach them how to do the kind of field work that we
do. So, the skills that we are more interested in, and this is what I
talk about in both of my classes and the professional people that I
bring in, in the undergraduate class where each week a different group
of people come in that do something, they work in consulting, they work
in water resources, they work in the mining industry, they work for
government, etcetera.
Invariably, without me prompting them, when the questioning starts and
students are asking them questions, or they are offering up their
viewpoints, invariably what is important for an employee to be able to
do well is to be able to communicate. That is to be able to communicate
verbally and in writing.
Nobody coming out of college is a good writer. Especially the kind of
writing that we do in a consulting company because it is technical
writing. Technical writing is different than authoring a research paper
to be published. You may think you are a good writer. Even people with a
graduate degree have learned to be a little bit better writers because
they had to author a thesis.
It usually gets brutally reviewed multiple times by multiple people, and
even again if you do a dissertation, there is still a lot to learn about
writing. So, we do not give people writing tests, but we can tell
certainly in an interview if somebody can communicate clearly,
concisely, and verbally. Even that plays into how you might express your
thoughts.
That along with interpersonal skills we are into way what might be
considered soft skills then the hard technical skills. We are going to
teach what we need them to learn. We expect them to have basic geologic
knowledge. You must be able to work with people.
We hired 1 young man during the pandemic. One of our younger geologists
has her PG (Professional Geologist) and the other will be taking his PG
test next year. So, he is five years in. We hired another guy. He has
since moved. He is still with the company, but he wanted to move to
Tennessee or something, which is a shame because he was, he was good,
and we got him all trained up. We got him all trained up to do
everything, but he decided to shift offices.
I think the answer to your question is no, but it was an extremely
limited exposure. My department only hired one person during that time.
I cannot speak to the hiring done by other departments.
Charbonneau:
What is the current workplace policy for working at home versus working
in the office? Do people work at home from out of state of their primary
office?
Nocita:
Everybody in my department is primarily there. But as I indicated
earlier, especially the transportation folks, there are people that just
work at home. They show up every now and then, but they are showing up
for a meeting or an in-person meeting with a client or something like
that. I know we just hired a woman, and she is completely remote. She
lives over in Saint Petersburg. Our office is in Tampa. So, there are
fully remote people, but not in my department.
Charbonneau:
Were there any new opportunities available to you due to the pandemic?
Nocita:
At USF I will reiterate that all the new opportunities were negative for
me with all the remote stuff. I have I have nothing positive to say
about the pandemic regarding my involvement at USF. I am glad things are
back to normal, but for S&ME? The main thing is I thought about this a
little bit when I saw that question.
The new opportunity is the whole use of these kinds of meetings like you
and I are having right now. They can save some time and money where we
used to go someplace and all sit together, depending on the type of
meeting that you must have with a with a client.
It can be just as effective remotely. I do not have to get in the car
and drive to Orlando or drive 10 miles away versus sitting here at the
proper time, going online, and doing what we need to do. That is a good
thing that came out of the pandemic.
As far as just general business opportunities for my department? I
really could not think of anything. I could imagine that you have heard
from other folks that have a scope of work that is beyond what my office
does, that opportunities might have come up. More use of drones or
something like that where you used to send two people out and now you
send one person in a drone because that is what you started doing during
the pandemic.
Non-geology stuff has come up in my company, but that is not proper for
this interview. Going in and helping with COVID related office issues. I
mean disinfecting and stuff like that. That obviously has nothing to do
with what I do. We did not get any new clients that I can think of
related to the pandemic.
Everything that we are doing now, we still pursue the same type of work.
We still talk about: “OK, we need to try to do more brownfield work,” or
something like that. Well, we have been trying to do more brownfield
work forever. Nothing is really changed. I think when it comes to that,
we have our areas of expertise and with the personnel we have in our
office, we talk about: “Well, do we want to really push to get this kind
of work? Does that mean hiring someone new or not?” all the usual
business development issues that our company and an office talk about.
I do not think any of it came out of the pandemic, other than being more
efficient with the use of computers. We are oriented towards a lot of
field data collection. It is the same thing we have been doing forever.
Report writing did not change or anything like that. A lot of what comes
out of my department, the ultimate product is something that is written
a letter, a short report, a great big semiannual report, whatever it
might be. Going into that is the collection of data, but it is different
than the kinds of things you just described. I am sure a whole lot of
interesting new things have come out of the pandemic.
