Downloading responsibility, part 1: making it the driver's problem

Published on May 28, 2024

In last month’s post, we looked a little closer at how companies that landed on the BestFleets Top 20 and Hall of Fame lists weathered the ongoing economic turbulence—but that just captures the idea that these companies have steady, reliable approaches to running their business generally. What we really want to know is why they are the best fleets to drive for—what makes them stand out in terms of the workplace experience they offer their drivers (while also being well-run companies)?

The answer is that they don’t make it the driver’s problem. In the first part of this two-part series, we’ll look at what that problem is, and in part two (next month), we’ll look at how these companies are avoiding this problem at a structural level and what other companies can do to replicate that success.

In essence, the “it” of “not making it the driver’s problem” is any problem or issue a company is facing that ends up being downloaded onto the driver’s shoulders (but shouldn’t be). While many companies in the industry are guilty of this (and it can make life miserable for drivers), Best Fleets winners have found a way to re-take ownership of various issues and fix them at a level appropriate for the nature of the problem. Here are some examples.

Keeping the trucks on the road requires paying steady attention to maintenance schedules and being able to respond efficiently if a breakdown happens. Throughout the questionnaire and interview process of the Best Fleets competition, we get a chance to hear about different approaches to this sort of thing from a lot of different companies. The ones that appear to be well-prepared will give us a long list of maintenance schedules, describe the expertise of their mechanics and how modern their shops are, and even the elaborate support contracts they have with third-party companies that handle breakdowns out on the road. But when we ask them how their preventative maintenance schedules affect their drivers’ ability to keep working, a significant number of them simply pull the driver off the road and have them wait. But if these drivers are paid by the mile, the company has suddenly made maintenance the driver’s problem. So too with mid-trip breakdowns—for all the arrangements they may have with third-party support, when it comes to keeping the driver running in another vehicle, or getting them back home, or supplementing lost income or even just putting them for the night—that’s the driver’s problem.

Switch over to the Best Fleets winners, and you start to see a different story. These are companies that will demand that preventive maintenance be coordinated with a driver’s time off—the driver comes in on a Friday, the work gets done on the weekend, and the driver is back at it while never having missed a mile. If it’s something more immediate, they’ll get the driver into a different truck. And out on the road, two things: Best Fleets winners do tend to have emergency protocols for taking care of drivers when the unexpected happens, but they also tend to stay on top of their maintenance in the first place, vastly reducing the chance of a breakdown happening. Just because a problem affects the driver, that doesn’t mean it has to be the driver’s problem.

There was a time when the mentoring program for a new recruit basically meant giving them the phone number of a veteran driver and leaving them to figure it out. The “it” in this case is the driver’s professional development, and for a long time, companies left that completely in the driver’s lap. And on the one hand, shouldn’t a person’s own professional development be their responsibility? Sure, they should absolutely have a big hand in that. But is it reasonable to expect a brand-new driver to immediately understand all the things they don't yet know, and figure out the best path to learning it? Among the Best Fleets winners, they’ve realized that the driver’s success is their success, which is why so many of them have put formal coaching and mentoring programs in place. By working out a system that provides structure, checkpoints and check-ins (not to mention opportunities for giving feedback on the process), these fleets have taken on the project of getting a recruit on a clear path of development so the driver can focus on the immediate job of actually driving.

Natural disaster planning is starting to become more mainstream, unfortunately, because those kinds of disasters are (and will continue to be) more common. When we interview fleets about it though, a lot of the focus is on business continuity, work-from-home strategies or redundancy for the terminal. But what about the drivers? If they’re routed to an area that is under threat, what happens to them? Quite often the answer we get is something like “They’re the captain of the ship—they can decide what’s best.” And while there is value in trusting the driver’s judgement about conditions, what these companies are really saying is “If you want to make money, keep driving; if you make the call to stop, that’s on you.” But there’s no reason a driver should have to choose between safety and a paycheck.

Best Fleets winners employ a set of different strategies to take ownership of this kind of issue—from pre-emptive rerouting to paid-for accommodations to paycheck guarantees—so that drivers don’t have to choose. If a natural disaster is going to affect the company, there’s no reason that that should fall on the driver. If you prioritize safety, you have to put your money where your mouth is and not just hope the driver makes the right decision right when the problem is happening.

The goal then, taking these three issues as examples, is to find those places in the business where responsibilities have been unnecessarily downloaded onto the shoulders of the driver, when in fact they belong (and are more easily solved) at the administrative level.

No doubt there are folks out there who will read this and think “that makes a lot of sense—I’ll get right on that and create a list of responsibilities I shouldn’t download”. But the truth is, there are so many possible places where this kind of issue can pop up, it’s unlikely that you’ll see all—or even most—of them. So how do you get ahead of the problem? The answer to that will come in next month’s article, where we look at changes you can make (and that Best Fleets winners have made) to the structure of the company that can help you find these pain points before they get out of hand.