LAS VEGAS – At a conference with literally hundreds of presentations about telematics, in-cab capabilities and other tech-focused topics, a panel came back to one of the most basic issues in trucking: How do you take care of – and keep – the driver behind the wheel?
And in staying with the theme of the conference, how can technology be adopted to reach that goal of more stability in a field with massive, endless turnover?
A three-person panel at Insight, the annual Trimble technology conference, offered a mixture of tech solutions as well as down-home recommendations on how to retain drivers and rein in eye-popping turnover rates.
Tim Crawford of Tenstreet provided some of the statistics on what carriers – which made up the largest percentage of attendees at Insight – are up against in trying to bring stability to their driver numbers.
Tenstreeet is a company focused on driver recruiting, onboarding and compliance. Crawford said the average person its network encounters is on the driver market once every four months, though he conceded that “there are drivers who are looking to see if there’s another job every week.”
Three million a year
The numbers informing that calculation are enormous. Crawford said Tenstreet sees applications from about 3 million individuals each year.
“The best indicator of whether the driver is going to be here in 90 days is just asking, ‘Hey, do you see yourself driving for us in 12 months?’” Crawford said.
That question should be asked often, according to Crawford, and used to determine over time whether “there’s some smoke and there’s some fire.”
But don’t just ask for feedback, he said. After getting drivers’ perspectives, “then do something, right?” Crawford said. “That carries a lot of water with the drivers. So I think just getting out and getting real data is really important.”
Panel member Jason DeShaw is the senior product director of driver experience and partners at host company Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB). In that role, DeShaw supervises the technologies that support drivers and what they go through on the road.
While no Trimble driver applications were exhibited during the panel, there were other sessions during the two-day conference on the use of some of those tools. For example: “Driver Pay Contracts: Improving Your Driver’s Experience” and “Keeping Drivers Ahead of the Storm: Predictive Hyper-Local Weather Alerts in CoPilot,” which is a Trimble product.
Before the code gets written, check out the UX
But just plowing away with the Trimble technology team is not the approach the company tries to take, DeShaw said.
“My responsibility before we write a line of code is to get out there in what we call the user experience discovery,” he said, using the term UX for user experience. The goal is to “understand what the business problem is we’re trying to solve.”
The idea should be to “make it as easy as possible. Don’t ask for things that we already know.”
DeShaw noted that as his panel was taking place, another a few doors away was looking at the topic of change management. One way to address change management, DeShaw said, is to recruit and hear from what he called “leader drivers” who have influence in the company and among other drivers.
“I think it is important to find that initial champion, working through understanding the pilots, getting feedback and tweaking things,” he said.
A particular challenge in creating technology that aids drivers is that they are “field workers,” DeShaw said, “so you can’t walk by their desk or the coffee machine and say, ‘How are you doing?’”
It requires taking an extra step to “curate their experience,” DeShaw said, which should include ride-alongs with drivers.
Mark Manera, the CEO and founder of Offshift, made a similar observation about the importance of internal leaders to drive change. Technology adoption, Manera said, is like a “bell curve.” In that curve, 10% to 15% of employees could be considered “early adopters.”
“And at a company, if you can get your road team or senior drivers that other people respect to buy in, we have found that to be really successful,” Manera said.
Offshift works with trucking companies to improve driver health, an effort that often can meet resistance. Manera said one approach he has found can be successful is to work through driver managers or dispatchers. “We really educate people about our program and how drivers can sign up, and because that driver manager then has that personal relationship, they can bring it up in the conversation,” Manera said.
Crawford had an analogy about working to bridge the gap between drivers who might not be technology-savvy and are resistant to change and trying to improve their experience by the use of that same technology.
“Escalators never really break,” Crawford said. “They just turn into stairs.” It’s a twist on the adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Building technology that “tries to handle everything” but then at times doesn’t work can be damaging to adoption efforts, Crawford said. The goal should be to develop a solution “that is more resilient, less fragile and is more real world-friendly.”
But to do so takes the same sort of outreach and understanding that was discussed separately during the panel. “It comes from an initial perspective that gets right to the driver experience,” Crawford said.
The always present health problems
Manera discussed his start in creating his health-focused company after working at a clinic in St. Louis.
“A bunch of truck drivers walked into the clinic, and it was my first time getting to know some drivers on a personal level, and the first seeing what 20 or 30 years behind the wheel can do to someone’s health,” Manera said.
Changing that is necessary for the future of the industry, he added, and not just for keeping people who are on the road healthy. It is important for the next generation.
Truck drivers statistically are likely to live 16 years less than the average American “because of their health and the amount of obesity and diabetes, just the chronic disease that they suffer with on a day-to-day basis,” Manera said. That’s going to make it difficult for a 21-year-old to look at trucking and say, “I want to be in this industry. I want to use trucking to provide for my family but no, I don’t want to end up like those statistics.”
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