Success Story: Culture and CDOT’s COVID-19 Response

By Kelly Hanson and Victoria Farberov, Process Improvement & Change Management Interns

May 24, 2021

How do you continue to provide an essential service while keeping your employees safe during a global pandemic? You adapt, you innovate, you rely on your organization’s culture. 

COVID 19 Response

Everything has changed in the past year except transportation safety. There are no days off in transportation safety, especially during snow days. This job is 24/7. The Office of Transportation Safety and Risk Management was tasked with establishing protocols to protect the Colorado Department of Transportation’s (CDOT’s) 3,100 employees. This group swiftly rose to the challenge.  

They came up with innovations across different CDOT areas including, maintenance, engineering, construction, environment, facilities, transportation development, and administration in order to keep people safe and the roads open. One of the aspects that makes their innovations stand out is how tailored they are to CDOT employees. For example, all the media and communications regarding COVID-19 featured CDOT employees in their real-life workspaces. To help ensure that employees feel safe, an email system that was specific to COVID-19 concerns was created to allow employees to elevate these concerns directly to the safety office. Also, CDOT was faced with the unique challenge of figuring out road maintenance while following the Center for Disease Control's (CDC's) guidelines, which kept CDOT from closing entire patrols that perform snow/ice maintenance. 

Safety culture

Over the years, CDOT has strived to build a culture of trust and innovation. This has been especially crucial over the past year. By creating this culture, CDOT has been able to bring its employees a sense of trust to their COVID-19 response plan. They deployed more safety measures and protocols, which has allowed the agency to continue working on its mission even in this unique situation.  

CDOT has always been passionate about innovation and continuous improvement. They have developed programs like Lean Everyday Ideas (LEI), which was designed to promote innovations and improvements throughout the agency by allowing all of its employees to submit innovations they have either implemented in their office or think could be an innovation that would benefit other employees. Take a look at our LEI page to learn more.