General manager: Kenneth Colson

Dealership group: Lithia Motors

Full-time employees: 95

General Sales Manager Danny Galat on learning how to be a better employer from managing through the pandemic: “We have maintained an immaculate dealership since before the pandemic. We’ve had sanitizing stations and hand sanitizer available to employees and customers in common areas for over five years. We have continued this and added sanitizing with foggers every two hours throughout the campus. We have added self-demo drives for our customers, with vehicle sanitized before and after. We learned that by doing all of this, it created a secure working environment for the team as well as a safe and comfortable shopping experience for our guests.”

Galat on long-term changes in hiring or employment practices because of the pandemic: “We awarded all employees an extra 80 hours of PTO in the event they contracted COVID. This assured them they would not be hurt financially because of the pandemic. We social-distanced all working stations for the safety of team members. They remain separated today.”

Colson on diversity, equity and inclusion as it relates to hiring and employment: “Because we are a production-based industry, we’ve never excluded anyone based on any of [those factors]. Quite the contrary, we have always been a business of inclusion, long before the recent calls for diversity, equity and inclusion. We have a long-standing history of being sensitive to this subject and will continue to do so.”