(Follow-up of “Trucking Departments with Teeth”)
A common theme as trucking companies grow occurs when departments need to be developed. Where smaller companies have fewer employees wearing many hats, the need for specialty departments arises. The bigger the company, the more departments that are needed. Safety, sales, recruiting, payroll, accounting etc. Now, suddenly, you have employees and departments wearing less hats and focusing on their departments. Other departments wash their hands of some of the tasks the new departments will be handling. However, there are some hats everyone has to wear all the time and can’t or shouldn’t remove those hats. I call these the culture departments as really company wide cultures are necessary for sustainability. There are three areas of business that everyone must wear the hat in trucking:
- Safety Culture: All hands on deck here! Everyone touches safety in some way everyday. It is very important that trucking companies have a safety culture and a protective mentality for the drivers. Not a Safety Police Department!
- Service Culture: This is what is sold to our customers and more and more these days the demands are in every corner from On-Time , Capacity, EDL and Tracking, updates, billing etc. All are and should be involved in servicing the customers.
- Driver Culture: Driver retention gets a lot of attention or at least lip service. Many larger companies hire retention managers to focus on this but again unless all employees are wearing the retention hat it will continue to be an industry challenge. I could go into so many ways each department in a company can affect driver turnover, but the reality is common sense should prevail. Again, understanding we are all there to support the driver who actually performs the service we sell is the key. They need to get loaded , get home and get paid.
No amount of data, reports or technology can overcome the need for positive cultures. And guess what? – That comes down to the people!
-Keith Carroll