Going “Soft”

Hey, we’re making progress! Yeah, the highways are still crumbling, most shippers won’t swallow fuel surcharges, and who the hell knows what’s happening with hours of service. There’s lots of whining I could do. So why the jaunty tone?

Well, it started a few weeks back when I delivered a speech to an assemblage of carriers, shippers, bureaucrats, and academics at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. It was the third Manitoba Highway Safety Symposium, and it turned out to be a very useful day. Much of what I said revolved around the external pressures drivers face pretty much every day. And when I took my seat again, the traffic manager who was sitting beside me leaned over and said he’d learned something. The next time he called his favorite carrier, he said, the question wouldn’t be, “How soon can you get this load to Dallas?” Instead, he’d ask, “How soon can you get this load to Dallas safely?”

I figured I’d won a convert.

More recently I realized that an awful lot of carrier people are also sounding. well, sort of enlightened. They’re expressing the need for a “softer” approach to managing drivers. Metaphorically and literally, they’re beginning to acknowledge that a really big belt buckle awarded after a zillion miles of safe driving isn’t quite enough to win driver loyalty.

It seems I can’t turn around these days without facing the subject of drivers. There’s talk about the shortage issue, or maybe about training, and every such chat finally comes down to a bunch of words about what the heck it is that drivers want. It’s actually a bit of a broken record. Not that the problem isn’t real. It is, but I continue to maintain that the solutions aren’t complicated.

Sure, that statement comes from an observer, not from somebody in the trenches fighting for survival. But, with respect, may I suggest that being stuck in the forest isn’t a great spot from which to see the trees.

The subject of drivers, in one way or another, was on literally every pair of lips in attendance at the recent Ontario Trucking Association convention. In countless informal chats with fleet owners and managers I asked how many drivers they needed but couldn’t get. Guys with fleets of 200 or 300 trucks or so told me they could use four or five. One fellow, and this was the most extreme case, said he had about 10 tractors against the fence. That’s 10 out of some 150.

Is that a crisis? I don’t think so, though I’ll readily allow that it could be in the near future if something isn’t done now.

Does it warrant a special task force, as the OTA has just created? Not in my humble opinion. This is a situation where a collective brain won’t really help. We have institutional hurdles that can’t be jumped, like the lag between high school graduation and the age when people could actually take up a driving career. We have a thriving economy where people who might fall back on trucking in leaner times are choosing easier work that may pay better as well. And we have a lousy image, deserved or not, that we’ve been unable to fix.

There are solutions, I’d suggest, but they’re not neatly packaged and ready to take off the shelf. They come down to the individuals in charge and those “soft” management skills that are hard to teach and harder still to put in practice.

That was the broad conclusion of a well-attended OTA panel session that explored the issue of driver recruitment and retention for an hour or so. And the core response of the assembled experts-including our own Virtual VP human resources columnist, Dr. Angelika Mellema-was that drivers must be better treated. They’re all too often just “tools” who are never integrated into the “team” with a common purpose, never allowed to get more involved in the business. I couldn’t agree more.

There was much I couldn’t agree with in that session, but the truly encouraging thing is that such “touchy-feely” sentiments are being said almost routinely nowadays-and by a great many people who were more likely to wield a big stick in days gone by. Not so long ago I thought there was just a small group of trucking folk who, like me, thought this way. We gravitated towards each other at meetings and spoke on the phone and traded e-mails, but for the most part we figured we’d be laughed out of any room in which we expressed such views.

Not any more.