This award is presented to a jurisdiction agency or individual who identified and implemented innovative changes that positively affected their agency and/or community. The innovative changes must be transferable to other jurisdictions or organizations, such as best practices, model legislation, standards, etc.
This can be either an agency or an individual award and is presented at the international level.
Each agency may submit only ONE entry.
Criteria for selection:
- Innovative change positively affected the agency and/or community
- Intended program benefits were achieved
- Measurable improvements
- Transferability of the innovative change
- Unintended benefits
2024 Winner
Iowa Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicle Division
CARE Training
The Iowa DOT has implemented a customer service initiative aimed at enhancing the skills of their workforce and improving service quality. The initiative involves creating and promoting newly adopted customer service core principles - CARE, with the goal of empowering employees to contribute to the DOT's strategic direction of serving Iowa's people and businesses as stewards of the transportation system. Deliverables of this initiative included: generating customer service core principles applicable to all areas of the DOT; developing a strategy to ensure all Iowa DOT leaders would adopt the core principles; ensuring all employees were trained on and setup to adopt the core principles; incorporating the core principles into existing training programs and initiatives; and developing a strategy for creating resources/support needed for division leadership to continue the service initiative after the initial rollout. To date, they have provided training and engaged in discussions with more than 3,000 Iowa DOT employees regarding CARE. Subsequently, in the MVD, customer satisfaction ratings exhibited a notable increase following the launch of the CARE customer service initiative. The County CARE Program deployed in May 2023 and included the same online training and CARE Workshop used within the DOT. This program was facilitated to all county staff in the 2023 All-Staff County District Training Days. To date, they have reached over 550 county employees.