One + One + One = Seven

In my company, we had a saying that went like this; one plus one plus one equals seven! The reference reflected the notion that often a person throws an idea out to the group, and the majority discounts the offering. Still, one person sees a little nugget of gold, and the next thing you know, the entire group is hyper-focused on creating and developing a great new process or solution to an existing problem. That is why whenever we created a new team, we always established ground rules for behaviour, the most important being that there is never a bad idea because, quite often, that’s where the good stuff is revealed.

Now imagine yourself surrounded by transportation professionals who share a hyper-focus on the successful recruitment and retention of our industry’s professional truck operators, with full disclosure on their methods. You and your company are participating members of a benchmarking group that shares and compares retention and recruitment-related data. Other participants also reveal their successes and failures designed to address many of the common challenges each company faces regularly concerning Re and Re.

What would it reveal if your company were to storyboard your entire retention and recruitment process? Does your company have a process that it follows? Is that process helping or hurting your numbers? Would it be beneficial to review those numbers and procedures with other companies in your group and to set them up with the same formula to ensure apples are being compared to apples?

What might you want to learn from like-minded competitors that might help your Re and Re efforts? I can come up with quite a few off the top of my head.

• The hire rate per 100 interviews
• The average cost per hire
• 30-60-90 – 1 year and long-term turnover numbers
• NPS Scores. What is yours coming from your driving force?
• Turnover by board & the average number of trucks per board by LP/OO/Co-driver
• The hiring program for current drivers? What is the hire rate, cost per hire and retention numbers versus bought drivers?
• What does your fellow group member’s onboarding process look like, including orientation and acclimation?
• What ongoing training is offered to their driving force?
• How do you train your dispatch managers in retention and how do they onboard to their boards?
• What new technologies are they using, and what have the results shown so far?
• Is there a Re and Re strategy that their company follows? What does that look like?
• Do they hire entry level drivers? What is their success rate and what does the program look like?

With the support of my good friend and colleague Chris Henry of KSM Transportation Consultants, we have designed a new offering for the industry. It is a retention council, consisting of a manageable group of carriers that will meet once a month for ten months virtually and two times in person. During our time together, we will compare data derived from commonly agreed-upon formulas. This data will reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly, which is where significant progress can be made.

“A rising tide lifts all boats.” Most of us have heard this phrase before, but have you heard the opposite phrase to it? It goes like this: “A falling tide sinks all ships”. We have had a falling tide for far too long in this industry. Isn’t it strange though, that there are always outliers in every group, and retention in trucking is no different? We are all aware of those companies in our industry (who might even be direct competitors) who buck the trend. They thrive with sub twenty percent turnover, all the while the industry average is in the triple digits.

The turnover that we have become accustomed to is not reflective of this great industry’s lineage and it deserves better. I see this group separating themselves from the pack and excelling in creating the stable workforce it takes to become a preferred carrier in their respective markets.

When you think about those companies that are perennial award winners in safety, retention, Best Fleets to Drive For etc., a question always comes to me, what do they have that the rest of their competitors do not have? They have trucks; they have trailers; they move freight etc. Physically nothing is different; culturally, that’s a different story and everything is different. They have found a way to allow drivers to become comfortable in their surroundings and they take pride in their roles at their respective carriers. They ride for the brand. Those carriers follow a formula for this ever-evolving success, but never lose sight of their core values and how intricate the person behind the wheel is to them.

Will joining the North American Retention Council help your company turn the corner on Re and Re? I have no doubt in that, but it’s up to you. More information can be found at https://www.ksmcpa.com/ksmta-trucking-retention-council/. We currently have a core of some excellent, forward-looking, award-winning carriers committed to this effort, but we need more. Please follow the link provided and decide if one plus one plus one might work for your company.

Safe trucking,

Ray J. Haight