Downloading responsibility, part 2: the tower of responsibilities

Published on June 24, 2024

In last month’s article, we looked at some of the ways carriers unnecessarily move administrative responsibilities down onto the driver—including issues around maintenance and mentoring. We also looked at how the Best Fleets are able to avoid these problems.

Let’s look at how to fix this issue (if you have it), and why the solution that Best Fleets winners tend to use is successful at the structural level.

The issues we’re talking about include any business-side situation creating an add-on problem that the driver is left to solve. For example, you pull a vehicle in for preventive maintenance (business-side), but then the driver is left with no vehicle and has to wait—which means they are not getting paid (driver-side). Maintenance isn’t the only area of the business where this can happen (see last month’s article for more examples).

Companies aren’t doing this on purpose—they don’t always realize a decision in one area is having an effect somewhere else. It’s like a Jenga^® tower—if you’re not paying careful attention, you can move a block jutting out from the side without realizing that you’re upsetting the weight distribution in another part…and then it all comes down.

Why would taking care of driver-side issues make your business run better? Because when your decisions have a negative effect on drivers, it will cause problems back on the business side—retention, customer relations, and overall productivity. You can probably guess why:

• Turnover increases when driver’s jobs get harder or more unpleasant
• Unhappy drivers mean less-than-stellar customer relations during a pickup or delivery
• Wasted time dealing with extra problems means you’re not getting maximum driver performance

Each of these issues is affecting your bottom line, so finding a solution isn’t just about making things better for your drivers for their sake—it’s also in the interest of the overall health of the business.

When fleets that make it into the Top 20 or Hall of Fame want to look at how a decision on the business side is going to affect the driver side, they’re really asking if moving a block in one part of the Jenga® tower is going to upset the balance somewhere else. And the way they do it is simply by asking. In fact, they’ve developed multiple sets of eyes at various levels of their companies—Driver Advisory Boards or Councils (DAB or DAC), committees, and sub-committees that include the voices of drivers directly.

In fact, while 72% of all the companies that participated in the Best Fleets program this year had some kind of DAB, when you look at just the Top 20 and Hall of Fame winners, that number moves to 100%. In fact, the vast majority have multiple committees giving feedback in all sorts of places, from driver-specific insights on programs and policies, to spec’s and tech, to charitable and community work, and more.

Driver insights and feedback help prevent decisions with unintended consequences at the point of delivery. By instituting a cycle of review, feedback and communication, you’ve got people to tell you right away how moving the block in one area is going to affect other parts of the business, especially on the road and at a customer location. (As a side benefit, utilizing committees and advisory boards helps drivers feel heard and more engaged with your fleet.)

And what the Best Fleets have discovered is that your business runs better when you develop a culture that not only invites, but capitalizes on what their drivers are seeing and telling them (before the tower ever starts to get wobbly).

Adopting a DAB or other driver feedback mechanism will change the culture of your company, and that isn’t a bad thing. Culture isn’t a fixed object, and being able to evolve in the face of changing times, people and business conditions is important—although you still have to manage that growth in the right direction (and for great discussions on managing the cultural growth of a company, check out these interviews with Best Fleets winners).

It may not be easy to make a change like this if you don’t have a driver feedback mechanism in place already. But without it, your business may be suffering from a structural set of issues affecting both your drivers and your bottom line, and a structural problem requires a structural solution.

But happily, driver feedback has already been test-driven by the Best Fleets, so the question is less about if it can work, and more about how you can make it work for you.