Key Takeaways:
- Ahead of Labor Day, SPL asked employees across the company what makes their work matter — and why.
- Their answers cover DMR turnaround, aviation and rocket fuel testing, water quality protection, and the quiet trust clients place in a report they may never see built.
- The throughline: accuracy isn’t compliance for its own sake. It’s what keeps people, communities, and operations safe.
Every report SPL sends out has a name behind it somewhere. Not on the letterhead, but in the work. A technician who ran the sample twice to be sure. A lab manager who flagged something that didn’t look right. A field engineer who calibrated a meter one more time before signing off.
Ahead of Labor Day, we wanted to hear from the team members who make SPL the great place it is to work, every day.
When the Work Matters
For a lot of our team, the proof shows up in small moments. A client’s relief, a passing quality control result, a piece of equipment doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Justin Wood, who works in our Environmental division, put it simply: work matters “when the clients are at ease knowing that their DMRs are completed and they have their reports in hand.” That relief is the point. A completed Discharge Monitoring Report isn’t just paperwork, it’s a compliance deadline someone was tracking, off their plate.
Crystal Polsky, also in Environmental, connects the dots further out: “I know the work I do matters when the data we generate is trusted to protect public health.”
Sarah Galaby, Quality Manager in Energy Labs, sees it in the confidence her results give to the teams downstream: “I see our teams producing reliable, defensible results that our customers can trust to make important business decisions.”
Moments They're Proudest Of
Some of the proudest moments came from client relationships. Justin remembers a client who recognized “how much hard work, attention to detail and efficiency with results were provided,” even when getting there felt like a hurdle.
Sarah’s proudest moment was watching quality become more than a checkbox: “quality is more than compliance, it’s a tool that helped our teams identify problems, improve processes, and deliver better results for our customers.”
And then there’s Jim Weldon, from our Fuels and Lubricants Lab, who tested fuel for a rocket launch, and watched it fly. “Watching a rocket launch knowing I tested the fuel which it was burning” is not a sentence most people get to say about their job.
Jim also tests aviation fuel, and the moments he thinks about aren’t always the successes: “when we test a fuel or lubricant and have a failing result, knowing that we not only saved our customer from selling bad product but potentially saved lives by honesty and not cutting corners.”
Where the Difference Gets Made
Monica Martin, Environmental, says it best: “The data we provide becomes the information someone needs to protect people, solve problems, and make better decisions.”
Another Environmental team member keeps it grounded in one specific outcome: “I know testing water makes sure pollution doesn’t enter our environment.”
Paige Seitz’ s answer, a Project Manager in our SPL Reading office, wasn’t about a single report or result, it was about the relationship itself. What she values most, she said, is “interacting with the clients and them feeling comfortable and trusting me to get things done,” especially working through difficulties calmly and kindly when they come up.
Reflections Going into Labor Day
None of these answers mention a piece of equipment or a certification. They mention trust, relief, honesty, and people who never set foot in an SPL lab but depend on what happens there. That’s not an accident. It’s the reason the work gets done carefully in the first place.
This Labor Day, we’re grateful for every person quoted here, and the many more across SPL who didn’t get a survey response into this post but show up with the same care every day. Thank you for the work you do every day, and for your commitment to preserving public health, and the environment.
This Labor Day, we’re grateful for the people who do this work with care, day in and day out, and for the clients who trust us with it. If you’re looking for a lab partner who takes that trust seriously, we’d love to talk.