Driver Retention
Posted on Nov 01, 2009 - 10:59am by Wayne Weisser in Trucking
I found this while scanning the news – It’s a site that has webinars (seminars on the web) and the older ones are archived or as a PDF. This is good if you want a big picture view of trucking and what “experts” are saying and predicting about the industry. Boring, because I feel most experts like weathermen, can’t predict what is going to happen tomorrow, let alone 10 or 15 years from now. Too many possibilities and one little change (like the housing market) will mess up their entire list of predictions. Take it with a grain of salt, pay attention to the short term and there might be something you can use.
A few highlights from the lecture on Driver Retention mentions the coming driver shortage (of course), but the surveys of why company drivers and owner operators quit was interesting. The biggest reason drivers quit a company is… Surprise, surprise – Money. For both owner operators and company drivers, it’s money. The second reason was Dispatch / Load Planning, which is actually connected to money, home time and everything else.
There is one slide that mentions the recession (or whatever) will end and freight will increase so carriers need to be ready for high turnover rates and driver shortages now. Editors note: Why wait?
Another point I want to mention about this was,
“People come to work for a company but they leave because of their manager.”
I can believe it. In large companies dispatchers only dispatch and there may be a driver or fleet manager that takes care of drivers needs, home time, more miles, requests and general complaints. After having a few bad fleet managers at a couple of large companies I’ve driven for, I believe it. One idiot disrespecting someone else, not listening or giving the impression that they don’t care, can piss off a driver more than messing with their pay.
Prepare for high turnover rates by straightening out your fleet managers and take care of driver’s pay. How about now? Money may be short right now for everyone, but you could save money by firing a few of the idiot fleet managers.
How about this for a concept – Hire a driver for a fleet manager? Seems like a few large companies must hire fleet managers out of their college intern pool. Either that or one company I was with had a few ex-drivers that were driver managers, but they were the ones that always screwed up when they were on the road. The company probably figured they could cause less trouble and lose less money behind a desk. So that should read – Hire a good driver for fleet manager. A manager must be able to sincerely respect others (can’t fake that one), understand what goes on and actually help drivers, he can’t have the attitude of, he has his job and the rest of you don’t matter and he has to leave in five minutes to pick up his kids, when the driver he’s talking to probably hasn’t been home or even seen his kids for several weeks.
If you have more than a few drivers or a few hundred there are some good points to keep in mind and there may be some other lectures/webinars that may interest you.
Here’s the link – http://www.piblive.com/retentionforum/OD-Retention-During-Rebound.pdf
And a list of other free webinars – http://www.piblive.com/retentionforum
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Gee. Driver Retention is such a HARD thing.
1. Driver Belief that the carrier is honest with the driver
2. Carrier Treats driver as an adult, with respect and consideration.(see 1).
Carriers that don’t do this have driver retention problems.
3. Pay is a distant third.
Anyone who has been a driver for at least a few years would agree that one of the biggest problems in the trucking industry in general is the fact that decisions are made in every area without the driver’s viewpoint taken into consideration.
For example – look at the way company trucks are spec’d out. Now you’re talking about an $80k tractor here – no heated windshield wipers, no built-in GPS systems, and 12 volt DC wiring instead of 110 volt AC. Seriously??? Absolutely unbelievable.
Also, the idea that “miles are miles” in the minds of dispatchers that have never driven before – 150 miles in Jersey is not like 150 miles in Arizona.
However, interestingly enough, driver turnover is way, way down during this latest recession. Why? Certainly not because drivers are being taken better care of and are happier where they are. If anything, it’s the opposite – they are not happy and not being treated as well as they would like. The lower turnover is the result of less demand for drivers and fewer choices for companies that are hiring. I drove for 15 years and I took advantage of the high demand by changing jobs whenever I liked, taking a few months off whenever I liked, and accepting lots of big sign-on bonuses. When driver demand is high, recruiting efforts are high, and it’s easy for most people to fall for the “grass is greener” thing and jump ship. I personally didn’t jump ship because I was unhappy with the companies I was with – I just wanted to try new companies and haul different types of freight. After I figured out what I liked I stuck with the last company for 6 years and was pretty happy overall.
Trucking is a brutal job and a tough lifestyle – people get fed-up quickly. I’d like to see a survey on what made drivers like myself get out of the industry – for me, the stricter scrutiny, drivers constantly taking the blame for everything, and the constantly increasing enforcement finally took all the fun out of it. When the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning is “I hope I can just get this done without DOT bothering me, or a random drug screen, or a lecture from the safety dept, or someone else pulling me aside for something” – the fun is pretty much gone. Even in the early 90′s when I first started things were much less strict and you were left alone most of the time. Now, nobody will leave you alone for 5 minutes.
The new guys don’t know the difference – they don’t know what it was like to be left alone to do your job most of the time. Before my time it was even less strict – much less strict. If someone called me today and said, “Man, we need ya. We just talked to the DOT and safety/log department and they said you’ve earned the right to be left alone – come on back and drive for us – you can do your thing” – I’d do it in a heartbeat. But just the thought of going back out there brings a feeling of dread – too much enforcement, too much B.S. Great career for a lot of years but it stopped being fun after a while.
My company has been having a heyday with this bad economy. They’ve cut pay, benefits, incidental pay for things like layover and breakdown and stop pay. In fact, they have cut so much, that I now make less money than I made when I started here nearly three years ago.
They’re not just happy with cutting pay, either. Heaven help you should you end up in a city where the company has a terminal. They have fired nearly all their local drivers and are forcing OTR drivers to do back to back to back local runs, including teams like myself and partner. Oh, and they did all this AFTER they lowered the minimum a driver gets paid to do local runs. So this basically means that you work all day for what amounts to no more than $2-$4 an hour. Then after spending a day bouncing around city streets, you are expected to drive all night on a “real” load. Lovely way to treat drivers, isn’t it?
I simply cannot wait for the power pendulum to swing back the other way. If I don’t have enough money saved to be an owner operator by then, I’m not quitting my current company. I’m going to hold their balls to the fire, just like they have mine (well, they haven’t literally held mine, since I don’t have any, what with being a woman and all, but still … you get the point).
I can’t wait. “Oh,” I’ll say, “you want me to run a local for you because you don’t have enough drivers to cover all your freight? I think I’m going to be needed a little extra financial incentive to do that favor for you.”
One of these days …
I’ve been taking advantage of some of the free seminars that are geared to carriers and fleet owners; it’s always interesting to see what the big guys are planning to do to us next. One I recently listened in on was how to do fleet ‘reductions’ . . like avoiding age discrimination suits, etc. Of course, they never come right out and say what to do . . but if you can read between the lines, you get some good info. And, one thing I learned LONG ago in dealing with these carriers . . they WANT you to quit. They dont want to lay you off because they dont want to pay unemployment. So, document carefully if you get your miles cut drastically so you can show you’ve been forced into an under-employment situation. It may gain you unemployment.Also, regardless of the threat or phonied-up ‘evidence’ of some dire transgression, DONT QUIT! Make them fire you . .and you can likely prove it was not ‘for cause’. Finally, after they turn you down for unemployment, appeal, then appeal then appeal again! Take advantage of the unemployment advocate provided free by the State. If you’ve documented and/or have witnesses, you will likely win.I had an advocate tell me she’d won all sorts of unemployment cases against my former company simply because the driver documented better than the company did. She had never known these carriers were doing these kinds of things because the terminated drivers weren’t fighting it. It costs you nothing but time and some paperwork to fight it – it costs them staff time and eventually attorney fees to continue to fight you. And when you finally win, the carrier has to pay three time the amount you eventually draw. So,cost them $$ by fighting back. Eventually, they’ll find it’s cheaper to deal with drivers honestly.