What would make you stay with a company?

You are exactly right. I made 125K last year. Woth 7 weeks paid vacation, A incredible 401K and stock purchase plan and enough other benefits to kill a horse. It's not hard to figure out.

 

This afternoon I was doing mutual expectations with my new trainee while a driver manager (Jeff) was on boarding drivers who had just completed training. While I was waiting for my guy to read through something I heard Jeff say "no, it is a big deal, you got lied to and I'm going to get to the bottom of this right now". Within 30 minutes a recruiter was fired and the driver was being apologized to by a Vice President.

A few years ago I called into support shift (after hours operations) and said "I need you to do XXX". Support shift said that's not possible. I said yes it is. Support shift said not it's not. I said "transfer me to Andy". Support shift said "there's no Andy here". I asked what desk number he was at, and he was dumbfounded. I told him where to find the IT barcode/desk number on his cubicle, then said "stand up, turn to your right and at the end of the row there's a guy with big friggin ears and a tiny nose at a standup desk, that's Andy, your boss's boss. Transfer me over to him". I told Andy to do XXX, Andy said "sure. sorry for the hassle, I will work with Support Drone 123 so this isn't an ongoing issue".

More than a few years ago we had a driver manager "Polyester Pants Man". "Polyester Pants Man" had previously screwed me several times and made @91B20H8 seek other employment. The only reason "Polyester Pants Man" still had a job is that he was friendly with several people at the Puzzle Palace and our Ops Manager was afraid of retribution if she tried to fire him. One afternoon I was my was into the yard for hometime and got assigned a short local run for the next morning. No big deal as I was getting in early, but there was a fly in the ointment - the customer notes said "will only recieve product YYY Mon-Thursday 0700-1500". The relay was scheduled to drop at the yard at 1600 Thursday and I would be there 1630ish. I messaged in around noon asking if the customer would actually take me on Friday. "Polyester Pants Man" responded with "good question, let me find out". I made my drop, hooked an mt, went to the yard, dropped the mt and still no response so I went inside. "Polyester Pants Man" was walking out of the Operations bull pen as I walked in. I asked him if he had an answer to my question. He hemmed and hawwed for a bit until Jeff (see above) tried to step in and find an answer. I very loudly (and polietly) said "No, Polyester Pants Man said he was going to get an answer for me 4 hours ago. I expect him to do his job and get me an answer or explain why Integrity is no longer one of our Core Values". The Division Manager came in to spread oil on troubled waters, pulling the three of us into a one on one room while Jeff found an answer. My statement of "I can't trust him to do his job" was a small part of why Polyester Pants Man got fired a few months later. The fact that he lasted as long as he did is a testament to how internal office politics can destroy the effectiveness of a company. No one in our operations group wanted him there, but doing something about it was more trouble than it was worth - despite the number of drivers it cost us. The guy shouldn't have lasted 6 months, but because his ineptitude was masked by poorly designed metrics and his team leader was afraid of fallout the guy lasted more than two years.

Two years ago we got a new CEO. One of his big pushes was to make different departments sit in and observe each other. It has made a huge difference in the way things work, particularly on handing off issues between shifts. Balkanization is a habitual problem of companies. A marketing manger should be intimately aware of what the drivers are experiencing as you are selling what the drivers can produce. December 2019 I got loaned to a new account startup because I am a top level driver and and driver trainer. For the first 6 months our driver turnover and accident rate was HUGE. I often pointed out the lack of space on the yard as the major factor for both. Somewhere around midsummer one of our yard jockeys got Covid, which meant all three of them had to quarantine. When they asked me to play yard jockey (with a sleeper truck) I used that to get Ops to agree to reimburse me for stripping paint, under the guise of "refreshing the lines", then redid the yard. We had 127 spots on 10'4" centers and I took it down to 120 spots - 12' centers on the pull throughs, 11'6 on half of the back ins, 11' on the rest. The customer screamed about losing 7 trailer spots, my response was "fire me if you want, but this is safer". There were meetings and much wailing/mashing of teeth, but ultimately it was "what's done is done" and we moved on. Last week I got a spot bonus - since painting the new lines our accident rate and "miscellaneous damage" repairs dropped by 72%. Turnowver had dropped as well, but the reason for leaving pay has surpassed work environment.

The moral is "listen to your drivers". You are experiencing driver turnover and have a survey completed by a third party which on the surface indicates driver dissatisfaction. Yet you are unwilling to either pay for the results or pay to recreate the survey. Both indicate an unwillingness to deal with the issues at hand.

Jeff steps up and deals with issues. "Polyester Pants Man" spends more time building relationships with corporate than he does with the drivers. On paper, "Poluester Pants Man" looked like a good employee, but was s#!+. My company was more than willing to let the customer have an unsafe environment, eating thousands in repair bills and god knows how much in lost capacity, but when faced with a fait acompli, they were more than happy to accept the benefits. If you aren't willing to spend the time and effort to understand root causes then you might as well start looking for a new job today as your company will go the way of Arrow and Conway.

 

Simply put.
Law of Unintended Consequences.

Do not put a policy in affect because a few people are idiots. Think first how it will affect all of your other drivers. Is it worth losing good drivers to keep the idots safe.Just get rid of the problem drivers. Same with cost savings measures. If your good drivers jump ship are you really saving anything?

Every action that affects a drivers income, working environment or the manner they preform their duties should be considered carefully to make sure it will have the desired affect.

A good driver with recent experience and a clean record can start at a new company within a week.
How long does it take to replace a GOOD driver?

 

While I give you points for having the initiative to ask strangers who have never seen one of your trucks what makes us stay with a company it's obvious that won't fix your problem.

Your drivers aren't leaving because of something your organization lacks - they're leaving because something is WRONG about your organization. The first step to getting it fixed is admitting that you have a problem.

I could write you a nice report about the problems your drivers face if I spent a week or two at your company but I suspect it would be ignored - too expensive, no one cares about that, that's how we've always done things - would be the excuses. In my experience it isn't one or two things that are the problem - there are organizations that take care of things as they come up and organizations that don't so things kind of pile up. Until you get serious about fixing what's wrong you're just going to be a revolving door for drivers to take a break at before finding a new job.

A few suggestions:
Talk to your drivers (not strangers on the internet). If you're in the U.S. there's a good chance that some of them speak English. Not as a manager/HR type interaction in an office under fluorescent lights - take them to lunch offsite maybe once a month for their first 90 days. Make up a reason (My son's been thinking about becoming a truck driver, would you mind if I asked you a few questions over lunch?), don't take a notepad, just polite conversation BUT during the meal ask two questions - "How was your day?" and "You've obviously done this work before. How do we stack up to other places you've worked?"

If you do it right they will tell you what you want to know for a fraction of what a consultant would charge you. The trick is LISTENING and FIXING what's broken.

 

I was at a company that was at one time a great company. There was zero handholding. Do the job and get paid well. Then they hired some doof from Yellow Freight into upper management. The first change they made was they cut the company trucks from 69mph and 450HP to 64mph and 350HP. You can’t cut a truck’s power more than 10%, but no one listens to anyone that’s not a beancounter. Instantly, the trucks became unreliable and in the shop constantly. That hurts money and 20 year drivers started to leave.

Thus, they got the bright idea to push the lease purchase deal on the newer drivers. Guys who didn’t know anything about our business and our freight. Safety rating plummets, contracts lost, more veteran drivers leave and the veteran fleet managers who was there when money was great start to leave. Cattle prods put into trucks (in the name of safety and new fleet managers are taught that drivers are stupid and need to be micromanaged. More veterans leave, more contracts lost, and suddenly our drivers are now on par with your entry level bottom feeder companies.

Want to know the craziest thing? Some new person in management would walk in and speak with drivers, trying to figure out why they can’t keep drivers, like you. When told the problem, they seem interested in fixing these problems, but get shut down by upper management. And they will never speak again until they quit and go elsewhere.

The company needs drivers that are stupid enough to pay for a job and the truck (lease purchase), but smart enough not to hit anything. That doesn’t happen. So, they have to micromanage, and put cameras and lane control and all this kind of cattle prod stupidtry in a truck driven by a driver that’s been with the company for 25years without an accident. Does that even make sense? Not to a veteran driver. Had a friend had his truck lock the brakes when a black plastic bag floated in front of him and he almost wrecked. He cleaned his truck out and went somewhere else.

You can’t replace an A Game driver with a Braindead idiot and a cattle prodded truck. Talent costs money. If you want to win the big game, you are going to have to pay for talent.

 

if the o/p cannot AFFORD to pay the drivers, perhaps fire them off, and rehire them thru a driver leasing company?

that way, the o/p pays the driver leasing company what they are worth?

 

Where is the $ coming from for all these ''like to have'' benefits?
Somebody will always do it cheaper or want it done cheaper.
Too much market fluctuation in a free market to control costs on a constant basis.

 

Well, OP quit responding Friday afternoon. I guess we can look forward to a response on Monday morning?

 

Maybe that was the OP's last ditch effort, and the OP is clearing out his/her desk......

 

I'll be honest, I'm glad he asked the question in the first place. But if I were in his shoes, I'd be asking the drivers at the company. Start calling them. Write down the complaints. Compile a list, and tackle the top five common complaints. That's a good starting point. Let all the drivers know with follow up which complaints are being addressed first. Man, people will hang around if they see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Edit: And if some of the top five common complaints are things you can't address, then level with them. "Bubba, I know everyone here hates the trucks being governed to 48 mph. However, I don't have the power to fix that one." Simple.