Ideas on retaining drivers in executive level moving?

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Looking for ideas to find, and retain, quality people in a difficult profession. Top level executive movers need abilities in truck driving, dealing with families in a stessful situation, strength, finesse, and administration. Complicated further by long road trips around the country. It's a deeper challange than compensation or benefits.

-- Jim Bottorff (jimbott@bellatlantic.net), January 20, 2001

Answers

You might find some ideas if you search our archives for terms such as "hiring," "retention," and "talent." Check out http:// www.fastcompany.com/search

Heath

-- Heath Row (heath@fastcompany.com), January 22, 2001.


First of all there are trucking websites that you can look at to build up ideas, such as http://www.owneroperator.com/index.htm

The important consideration for me is that truck drivers have a unique culture and if you focus on strengthening that culture and work off it, it is going to be easier to deal with the issues that arise in that culture. At the end of the day a trucker has a lifestyle that usually they are proud of and there is a lot of self- help power that you can tap simply because there is such a thing as a trucker community, an enclave with its own community and rituals. What I think would help you is to focus on the pride of working as a trucker and that means having conversations as to what it means to be a professional truck driver. It means to look at health issues, listening to truckers as human beings rather than as people that work for you. Get input from them what they would like to see in the way of stress reduction and what their culture means to them and then when the weaknesses and fragile links in that community is found, use the power of the community to try to heal them. At the end of the day I think you have succeeded if your efforts facilitate and strengthen the bonds of the underlying trucking community and giving back to your truckers a sense of who they are and ultimately to listen to them..

We worked with a very large manufacturing concern whose transportation department was big enough to be a fair size trucking company in its own right. When we consulted with the transportation people we created a newsletter which focused on giving back the feedback we got from listening. We created that newsletter in a style and format that says one big thing to a trucker, "we are being taken seriously". So the effort that went to make it interesting and informative as well strike at the heart of their issues was well appreciated. That newsletter was designed to look good as well as send out a message that as people, we value them and what they do and focused on what we have heard from them, what actions we were going to take (and that means no weasel word bullshit) and three things that were going to change that would impact the transportation department viz. the values of 100% on-time delivery, one team-one vision and that team values matter. It is was merely a question of being professional and showing these people no-bullshit respect and by getting their respect, aligning company values so they too can feel that they are a valuable part of the same team.

M.

Profile at: http://www.fastcompany.com/fasttalk/replypost.html?p=9738

-- Mark Zorro (zorromark@consulting.com), January 22, 2001.


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