Assistant Dean Honored By Eastman Chemical, NC State

By Sarah Stone

Assistant Dean Alicia Lecceardone is being honored for her efforts to improve safety at the Wilson College of Textiles. 

Lecceardone, who serves as the assistant dean for culture, talent and human resources, recently received an award which is jointly sponsored by Eastman Chemical Company and NC State. Eastman’s Innovation Center is located on Centennial Campus. She was nominated for her overhaul of the college’s onboarding program for new employees. 

The award recognizes the most impactful and effective safety initiatives across NC State. 

“The award committee is seeking best practices, something that can be applied elsewhere in the university or a novel idea that  looks like it’s really working,” Eastman Global External Innovation Manager Dawn Mason says. 

Lecceardone and her human resources team partnered with the college’s Lean Six Sigma experts and members of Textiles Creative and Technology Services (TCTS) to completely revamp the college’s orientation for new employees. She says she wanted the new process to minimize the amount of lag time between a new employee’s first hour on the job and when they can start working. 

“So often, you can get caught up in making the onboarding process all pretty, like, ‘Hey, we have breakfast laid out for you on your first day.’ But you can’t log into your university email,” she says.

Lecceardone used a stakeholder committee to create a handbook of what new employees need to know and whose responsibility it is to teach them. To improve efficiency, Lecceardone’s team incorporated this list into a project management software called Trello. 

“We were really able to integrate automation into it,” Lecceardone says. “We can see analytics of how long it’s taking someone to complete these onboarding tasks and who is not completing them.”

This approach played a role in keeping employees safe during the pandemic by making it easier to complete the onboarding process without gathering in person. 

The pandemic also forced the college safety committee to reevaluate their lab-specific safety training. 

“Before the pandemic began, you rarely wanted someone working in a lab by themselves, because a lot of times equipment needs to be monitored by more than one person. Sometimes working in a lab alone comes with its own risks,” she explains. “But when COVID came, so did space and density restrictions, so we had to really revisit our training and procedures.”

She says QR codes provided an easy solution. Anybody entering a lab space had to scan a QR code on their way in. 

“That way, if we’re in a situation where we don’t know what happened to someone, we can figure out when they left or entered a certain space. It’s also a way for us to make sure that anybody working in a lab space was somebody with the training and permissions to do so.”

Mason says Lecceardone’s efforts stood out because of the level of change she could affect by working with new employees. 

“When you think about bringing people into a new position, that’s one of the most vulnerable times in a career,” Mason says. “Anytime you start something new, you’re vulnerable from a variety of perspectives, but in particular from a safety perspective. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

In addition to the pride of being recognized, Lecceardone also received funding from Eastman to continue improving and expanding the college’s onboarding program. She says she’ll use the money to include supervisors and further incorporate analytics into the process.