Director's Corner

We are embracing change and making progress

Malcolm Dougherty

Malcolm Dougherty

At our last Town Hall meeting, we talked about change and the progress we have made over the last five years, where we are now, and the next steps we will take to continue to strive for excellence.

Since our strategic plan came out in early 2015, we are measuring our performance in more areas to ensure we meet our expanded goals of safety and health, stewardship and efficiency, sustainability, system performance and organizational excellence.

You, and the rest of California, can see these performance measurements in the quarterly Mile Marker report. We are improving our communication and our partnerships, and highlighting our progress. Each of you contributes to us achieving our Mission and our Goals.

We are using Lean 6 Sigma to find more efficient ways to do what we do, and we are expanding our use of data to increase our successes and have a greater business intelligence. We invite you to see our progress at our innovation website, where we host employee ideas and innovations that can potentially cut costs and boost our efficiency. Thank you for joining the conversation and offering your input.

The Executive Management team is listening to what employees said in our July internal survey, and we are making changes to increase communication, training and more. In the future, we will be hosting training on how to navigate our innovation website, and we will have more innovation fairs and Lean 6-sigma training.

Organizational excellence is our goal to promote a positive work environment.  We want to maximize accomplishments, encourage innovation and creativity and ensure staff performance is aligned with Caltrans goals.

We want to encourage our managers and supervisors to engage employees with mentorships, rotations and options to shadow executives. We are also working to increase the number of employees on research and policy committees, and giving out superior accomplishment and merit awards for innovation and creativity.

This is all part of our continuous improvement process for Caltrans to be a performance-driven, transparent, and accountable organization.

A world-class transportation system requires a professional staff to plan, design, build, maintain, operate and manage it. We can only do this with a capable, well-trained and motivated workforce equipped with the right tools and resources. Caltrans is committed to providing you with these tools and resources. After all, you are our greatest asset.

Thank you for your hard work, innovation and feedback.