One of the things that I like best about my job is that I get to tour pretty much any City facility that I want to tour. I like to do this because it is interesting to see the work that our employees are doing, and because it is always impressive to me the level of creativity and innovation that I see in our workplace.
Here’s a good example. If you’re from Minnesota, you know what these are. For those of you that are not: They’re hockey goals.
You can’t really tell from the photo, but the goal on the right is about 1/3 the weight of the goal on the left. What’s innovative about the hockey goals on the right is that our Parks Maintenance employees designed and manufactured them. They manufactured these new hockey goals because they could not find a readily available and suitable commercial product that we could purchase. So they built what they needed.
Actually, they built what we needed. They built these new goals because they received concerns from parents that the heavy goals might injure a small hockey player if it fell on one. Our employees analyzed the problem and devised a solution. Then they built the solution.
This kind of constructive problem solving is going on all around our organization on a daily basis. We’ve got a lot of creative and innovative people that work for the City of Eden Prairie. We’re lucky to have them on our team.
