While the trucking industry can be late to adopt new technology and workplace trends, CarriersEdge president and co-founder Mark Murrell believes fleets can use that delay to learn from the mistakes of other industries.
“If we are smart, we can look at what those other industries did, the problems that they encountered, figure out what they did to solve those problems, and then just [go] straight to the solution, avoid those headaches altogether,” he said during his keynote speech at the second annual Best Fleets to Drive For conference in Charlotte, N.C.
With that in mind, Murrell says fleets should learn how other sectors have approached online training, employee feedback, performance management, and adopted technology.
Balancing online, in-person training
Online training has become a common approach for driver education, with 92% of Best Fleets finalists now utilizing it. But 20 years ago, trucking resisted the approach even though e-learning courses were used in other sectors. “The response from most people was some variation of this: ‘What are you talking about? That’s crazy. Drivers can’t do stuff online. You got to look him in the eye when you do training.’”
Now, however, Murrell warned that fleets rely on online training a little too much.
He cited a consulting firm that attempted to make 90% of its training digital, but had to scale back to 50% within six months after some employee backlash. The employees didn’t like being forced to do things just one way, without any alternative.
He says trucking is now at a similar crossroads. While online training is widely adopted because it provides drivers with the flexibility to learn at their own pace, while eliminating challenges and costs for fleets, many fleets are offering little to no in-person interaction.
“Drivers are starting to have the rumblings of great discontent in this area,” Murrell said. “If it’s too much online, people don’t pay attention, they don’t engage, they don’t enjoy it. They don’t get the full value out of it… Balance is absolutely critical.”
Based on other industries and the corporate world, he suggested only half of the required training should be online, maintaining virtual classroom sessions for interactive learning, person-to-person connections to foster engagement, and informal feedback sessions to address concerns and improve training.
Collecting driver feedback
The trucking industry is also facing challenges with the way it gathers feedback from drivers.
Murrell explained that when online surveys first became widely available in the early 2000s, companies of every sort saw them as a quick and inexpensive way to collect employee input. HR departments began sending out surveys for everything, flooding employees with feedback requests.
He explained that trucking fleets have reached a similar stage. For the first decade of the Best Fleets to Drive For program, fleets were encouraged to ask drivers to participate through online surveys. Few did. That changed before the pandemic, when fleets reached a good balance of surveys, phone calls, town halls, and informal conversations.
“Covid-19 kind of killed all of that and moved everything online,” Murrell said. “People got all that stuff online, and kind of stopped doing much of the other stuff.”
Today, fleets still rely heavily on digital surveys, leading to what Murrell calls a “survey burnout” among drivers. With fleets continuously pushing out online forms, he says participation rates are dropping, and feedback quality is suffering.
Rethinking performance reviews
Just as fleets have become overly reliant on online surveys to gather driver feedback, many have also allowed driver management to become too data-driven. With the vast array of telematics and electronic login device (ELD) data now available, many fleets assume that drivers no longer need structured performance feedback.
“[Before], the safety and risk people were scrounging for any bit of data they could get about which drivers were good and which drivers were bad,” Murrell said. “[Then] ELDs came along with all of the data that they provide, telematics, dashcam scorecards. All of a sudden, fleet people are swarming with all of the data they could ever imagine for drivers, and drivers have all of this information as well, available immediately.”
Murrell warned that eliminating performance reviews entirely is a mistake. Now, instead of just reviewing numbers, companies have a chance to assess the qualities and attributes that make a great driver. Murrell said that, in some industries, performance reviews evolved into discussions about career growth and skill development.
Technology adoption
A rapid influx of technology in recent years has moved trucking from an environment with minimal back-office software to one in which fleets are inundated with ELDs, telematics, dashcams, and compliance management systems.
“Safety people have been like kids at Christmas,” Murrell said, adding that rushing into technology without a strategic plan led to challenges. Some fleets have implemented multiple overlapping systems without fully understanding how they integrate, confusing managers and drivers alike.
“We have seen some people in the Best Fleets program that have got just about every system imaginable in their companies,” he said. “They kind of liked one thing about all of these and didn’t really take the time to learn everything about how they work together.”
This led to efficiency gaps, but also frustrated drivers, further contributing to their disconnect with carriers.
Other industries faced similar struggles, but they learned to adopt a measured approach. Instead of evaluating new technology separately, they compare multiple alternatives before making a decision. Murrell explained that if fleets only compare a new system to the old way of doing things, it will always seem like an improvement. However, when multiple solutions are assessed side by side, it becomes easier to determine which solution will actually work best.
The rollout process also plays a critical role in success. Murrell noted that the corporate world now takes a step-by-step approach to adopting new technology, implementing one tool at a time and allowing a three to six month to adjust before adding another.
“Trying to do too many different things at once ends up being a problem,” he said. “[It] ends up being as bad as doing nothing.”
The potential of profit sharing
The trucking industry is also beginning to explore new ways to attract and retain talent.
Some carriers have embraced profit sharing and employee ownership models to create stronger long-term engagement. While still in the early stages, 27% of Best Fleets’ finalists had some form of profit-sharing program in place.
Murrell noted that while profit sharing can boost engagement, it has to be carefully managed. If it becomes an expectation rather than a bonus, disappointment can follow in weaker financial years.
“It can absolutely be a double-edged sword. It can be amazing. It’s a great way to get people feeling part of the company and thinking about the broader organization… But the double-edged sword is that if it becomes too commonplace, too much of an expectation, it becomes an issue,” he said. “You can certainly still do profit sharing and communicate [that] it is absolutely a good program to consider, but keep in mind that it can be very concerning if it is starting to get discussed as if it’s an assumption that it’s going to happen.”
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