Opinion: The Secret Weapon for Retaining Drivers

This Opinion piece appears in the May 5 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

By Lisa Aspinwall

Account Executive

HNI

Driving trucks is more a lifestyle than a job, and it’s not for everyone. Drivers often work in the small hours of the night, live on the road for weeks at a time in cramped quarters and pilot big rigs through city streets in maneuvers roughly equivalent to steering the Queen Elizabeth 2 up a creek.

The ongoing driver shortage makes recruitment and retention an imperative. Carriers are looking for anything and everything to leverage so that drivers sign up and stick around. To this end, benefits for truck drivers have become more important than ever.

And not just any benefits. Because all motor carriers are facing the driver shortage, competition for talent is tough. Exceptional benefits could mean the difference between a fleet whose drivers stick around and a fleet that drives them away, looking for better benefits.

Here are four reasons employee benefit packages support driver retention:

• Drivers want to feel like family.

What does the word “family” mean to you? Security, loyalty and love? Exceptional benefits go a long way toward building a company culture in which employees feel secure, loyal, and yes, maybe even loved — or at least valued and respected. It’s no secret that some of the most fiercely loyal employees in the trucking world work for family-owned and run carriers, particularly those small enough that the drivers know the family members by name.

Benefits, especially health-care benefits, cover a lot of what happens outside work. When a carrier’s executives show they care about a driver as a person — not just a minion who gets cargo from here to there — it makes that driver feel like he’s family. Loyalty is an above-and-beyond emotion, and great benefits can help a trucking firm earn that loyalty from its drivers.

• Drivers want to be able to provide for their families.

Drivers who stick with the job, despite its lifestyle challenges, obviously value commitment and are made of pretty tough stuff. They do it because they love driving a truck, not because it’s easy. And if they care so much about their work, it’s probably a safe bet that they are equally loyal to their family back home.

Drivers need to feel that their families are being taken care of even when they are thousands of miles from home. Good benefits make that possible, and employers can leverage the peace of mind afforded by great benefits toward better retention rates. Everyone wins — carriers get truck drivers who value commitment and safety, and drivers get security for the people who matter most to them.

• Drivers talk to each other about the company — what works and what doesn’t.

When you get any group of employees together, from snack-food bakers to bucket-truck makers to Wall Street investment firms, those workers are going to talk about the biggest thing they have in common: their employer.

A hearty consensus among employees that their mutual employer is the bane of their workday existence is pretty much the last thing an employer wants to hear. That sort of company culture is notoriously anti-retention because it essentially gives employees — particularly drivers — permission to quit and find out if the grass really is greener on the other side of the highway.

Motor carriers can shift employees’ conversation in a more positive direction by the simple application of exceptional, family-friendly employee benefits. Driver churn isn’t easy to reverse, but the one thing that can do it is the kind of benefits drivers can brag about when those working for other carriers drag out their horror stories.

Great driver benefits not only can change the direction of the employee conversation, but eventually even produce personal testimonials about compassionate and affordable medical care and growing retirement accounts. As the culture improves, employees will find fewer reasons to grouse about the company and leave. What’s more, when talking with their peers outside your company, they’ll be the best recruiters you’ve ever had, delivering powerful word-of-mouth testimonials to your benefits package.

• Drivers want to know they’re valued members of your team, the proof being the quality of benefits you offer.

What’s more, if nondriver employees are getting benefits such as health insurance, paid vacations, sick days, retirement programs and other perks, it’s vitally important that you provide benefits of greater or equal value to your drivers. This heads off resentment toward their nondriving colleagues and makes the organization feel fairer.

There is an additional, more subtle factor at work here as well: Conscientious, careful, safety-minded drivers care deeply about benefits, particularly for their family members, and those are precisely the people trucking companies want sitting behind the wheel of their biggest rigs.

So there’s the equation: Exceptional benefits are a key building block for a solid company culture, and that culture is, in turn, a huge factor in retention. An enviable, solid benefits package is an important tool for recruiting drivers signing on for the long haul in terms of both distance and long-term retention.

HNI is an insurance and business advisory firm specializing in the transportation industry. HNI has locations in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.