The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #83
Mark: Hello, and welcome to episode eighty three of The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Mark Murrell, Co-Founder of CarriersEdge.
Jane: I'm Jane Jazrawy. The other one.
Mark: And if there's anybody who has listened to this podcast at all in the past, you know that early January wary means one thing and pretty much one thing only. For us, and that is the scoring of the Best Fleets to Drive For finalists.
Jane: Beginning of December is nothing but interviews, and beginning of January is nothing but scoring.
Mark: And we have been deep into it.
Jane: Oh my god. It's hard this year?
Mark: It is hard. It is hard. Hard every year. I think every year in January, we have a podcast where I freak out about not getting it done. We both talk about how hard it and how much there is to do.
And then we talk about the things that we've found and it's like a catharsis that we come out of this thing recharge to go back to it.
Jane: Yeah. It well, I think it has actually been extra hard this year because we have new people in the team scoring, which is tough, but also because there's more fleets in the finals than we've ever had before. And people are stepping it up.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And so they write more which means we have to read more.
Mark: Which isn't necessarily an indicator of stepping it up.
Jane: No. Well, no. No. No. It's the quality of the information that they write.
But part of the process that we have to go through is figure out what parts matter and what don't what's fluff, what's, you know, sort of empty sentences, which are, you know, how you feel rather than telling us what's actually happening on the ground, like, you know, your thoughts and feelings is not really relevant. So we have to kind of skip to the, like, you know, where do you answer the question? And that's it's a lot of reading. Like, people think it's a lot of writing, but we have to read everything twice, basically.
Mark: Yeah. I wish they would write less. Because I've had several already where I'm going through it. I'm like, yeah, this is garbage. They're not doing anything.
This is just marketing BS.
Jane: It's filler.
Mark: And then there's three words in the middle of a paragraph. I was like, that's all I needed to see. Yeah. I I now I can see what you were doing.
Jane: You could have expanded on that and you may have gotten more points.
Mark: Or just left the three words. Yeah.
Jane: Or, yeah, just had just those three words.
Mark: Which I think this is also a tradition where we gripe about the way people write their answers.
Jane: Well, you're basically grading mini essays, ninety-six mini essays on every question. Yep. And you have to figure out your scoring legend, and then you have to figure out what's important So there's stuff that people do that are not really super awesome. Like, it's kinda like, oh, okay. So you have to decide what is actually a good thing.
What's a, and then so for all the new people, we have to kind of communicate that. Like, you know, look, all they're talking about is themselves. I'm not talking about drivers in this question. So Mhmm. You can't give them full marks.
It sounds good, but it's only good for the office. What's going on with the poor driver?
Mark: That I don't wanna come back to later. But on the issue of the newbies helping, we have that pretty much every year.
Jane: Now, yeah, it's like a tradition now.
Mark: Yeah. Anybody who starts a position with us during the year in a couple of different departments is going to do a cycle through Best Fleets.
Jane: Yeah. Fair warning for anyone who's actually thinking about trying to get a job here because get dumped in.
Mark: It's such a great way to learn about the industry. Yeah. And you level up on industry knowledge so fast because you just immersed in it.
Jane: Mhmm. And you're not it's not just passive either. You have to, if you are part of the interviewing or scoring process, You have to think about what you're saying to people. You have to think about what you're hearing and you have to think about the value of what they're saying.
You have, I mean, it is not I'm just gonna listen like some people do listen in and do nothing else, which is fine. That's a totally different thing. But the people who are involved you know, you get a crash course and it's it it's tiring and it's intense.
Mark: Yes. And what I'm finding interesting is how much it's different even when they're involved in interviewing. So people that are involved in interviewing, you think, okay, you're getting deep into it because they're they're getting used to kind of burying themselves in somebody's questionnaire and getting to know that company interviewing them, learning more about what they're doing. And through that, they do start to identify some trends and they start to see some things that people are doing and they they get familiar with the language. But then when they go to scoring, it's a whole different thing
because the interviewing is kind of a vertical thing. You're looking at everything that one fleet is doing. You don't care about any other fleet during that time, you just care about this one company. But then when you get to scoring, it flips completely to being horizontal, where you don't care about this one company, you only care about this one question, and you care what everybody is doing in that one question. And that has been really eye opening for some of the newbies that are helping us this year is that they are seeing, oh, I did a whole bunch of interviews, but I didn't realize all the different things that people say about this one question.
And is any one of them only did maybe fifteen or twenty interviews, which is a good perspective of how things work, but is not the same as looking at ninety-five different answers for one question.
Jane: Right. And the question that our new Best Fleets program manager, Trish, he was saying, you know, like, what does what are the differences? Like, what does this mean?
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: There's so many different things. And I'm like, yeah, it's not really so many different things, but it's the language that everybody uses to talk about the same thing. And we were talking about yesterday we were talking about new entrants and there's so many different bits of language around how a new entrant program works. That it's almost like you have to learn the industry to figure out what the new entrant program is, which I guess is fair now that I'm saying it. So poor Trish.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: We probably shouldn't have given her that class to
Mark: We did give them some easier ones to start with and then sort of ramped it up a little bit. And then, yeah, both her and Selase got really hard ones yesterday. And I've realized that probably was a mistake. I shouldn't have given them something so difficult. Selase got onboarding.
Jane: It's also that's also the education about everything. Right? Yeah. So like he's looking at, you know, what is PSP and what is background checks?
Mark: Practical and sort of yard training and road testing and all of that In
Jane: drug and alcohol in the clearinghouse. So who knows what people are calling that? So you have to figure out what the different names are?
Mark: Yeah. We weren't seeing too much of that. It ended up being what are the different ways that companies can check-in with drivers after orientation is done? Who's involved? Is it just a trainer who's involved or is is the company executive getting involved in the onboarding?
Is anybody doing pre work before drivers show up? Which definitely there's more of that, more of the complete these online courses before you show up. And one of the things that he noted. And we talked about it a little bit because we would like to find a way to score it if we could, but is a really tricky one. And that is the duration of the orientation.
Because, well, it's getting to the point that there's some people that say they've got online only. There's basically no classroom when you show up and you get your keys, you do a road test, and you get your keys, and that's it. And then there's others that are still doing the three day kind of classroom thing, and they may have some stuff pre work and then you go with an instructor afterwards but they're still doing that sort of three days in class. And his point was, like, it seems too short. If you're just there for half a day or you just showing up to do a road test and then get your keys.
That seems like it's way too short. And he's kinda coming with fresh eyes from outside of the industry. And I'm like, yeah. That is way too short.
Jane: Well, I think it also depends on who you're hiring and what experience they have and what do they need. It's and I do agree half a day is short. Because you do kind of need to in an orientation, it's not about knowing how to do the job. It's also knowing about who the people are and how you work with them and if you don't.
Mark: How are you gonna start building relationship with that company
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: In a half day orientation?
Jane: Yeah. Well, if you go in and just meet all the people.
Mark: You're gonna forget those names. I mean, we've had that experience where you go to a new job and you get walked around it. To to meet everybody. And by lunch, you've forgotten most of them.
Jane: And also with our own or onboarding process, there's a lot, you know, even when people know how to do the job. It's the job specific to us.
Mark: Yeah. You get company processes and and for a fleet. It's gonna be something about the equipment, the specifics of the equipment, the way it's configured, the customers, the way those things work.
Jane: So Why don't you score it on duration? You've got duration?
Mark: We don't have it consistently.
Jane: We should because we have how many days are that you paying for? It's just another question.
Mark: Yeah. We ask if you pay for orientation.
Jane: And how many
Mark: compensation.
Jane: Right.
Mark: But they don't all answer. They often will say we pay this much per hour or or we pay this much per day or something. So we might look into it.
Jane: You should you should take a look because every time I did an interview, there was we were getting the number of days.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: This is another problem that we have is that we start scoring and we realize that we want to score on something, and we don't have the information for everybody. And it's not terribly fair to
Mark: Yeah. Well, the other challenge around that is, okay. Show up, do all the work before you show up, come in, get a road test, and get your keys. That's not ideal. There should be some time there to get to know the company and learn the specifics.
But how much? And how much is too much? Is it we don't wanna say that you're better just because people are sitting in a classroom for three days or four days. That's could be inefficient. Could be a huge waste of time.
So we have focused on traditionally, we focused on what do you do after orientation to help people get ramped up. So sort of outside of that, we've kind of ignored that block because for a while everybody was doing a lot of the same thing. But they now I think what we wanna do
Jane: I don't wanna go back to what do you do in orientation.
Mark: No. I think for next year, I think we may wanna reword it a little bit to reflect on how long is your orientation?
Jane: Do you have prework?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So basically, the pro maybe it's the the question is, what do you do before drivers come to orientation? What do you do after like, do do drivers do anything before they show up at orientation, do how do how our drivers support it after orientation? Instead of saying, what is your onboarding process? Like like, just don't don't we don't even care.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It's like we assume that they're gonna meet everybody.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: They're we assume they're gonna get a road test. If they aren't.
Mark: Yeah. Don't tell us that you're doing a background check because you're legally required to do a background check.
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: So what we really care about is And we may wanna say how long is orientation and how much are they paid for?
Mark: But I I think there's a change to that question coming.
Jane: Yeah. Okay. We should probably put that in then.
Mark: Trish? Add this to your notes
Jane: Trish, can you put that, actually, Carly, can you?
Mark: Beautiful.
Jane: Management by podcast.
Mark: So that's been an interesting discussion. And, yeah, we're we're finding lots of stuff. I'm I'm seeing as we as we noticed people that are really stepping it up, which we had noticed during the interviews. I noticed that early on when I was just reading through the the questionnaires. I was like, wow, people are really stepping it up this year.
And definitely coming in the in the scoring.
Jane: I think I was the first one to say it. And I was like, oh my god. This is I
Mark: remember that conversation that we had, and it was It might have been, like, the first week of interviews or something.
Jane: I just had to look at a couple of questionnaires and they and from fleets that aren't on the hall of fame, that weren't repeated, like, It was like just your regular first timers. It was like, oh, okay. This is this is not a regular first time questionnaire. And, actually, there's been a couple of fleets who've just, you know, kinda rocked my world here where it's like I thought I knew them. And then all of a sudden, is like, what?
Yeah. This is amazing.
Mark: And it's it's one of those things where I think, well, is it that they've changed a whole lot or they just got a different person doing it who's telling the story differently.
Jane: I think it's well, for For the ones I'm thinking of that are both Canadian, and I said that I said it during one of their interviews. I did I did tell them this that it was like, you know, it's like a different company. And and their response was basically that they wanted to put all these things in. They just hadn't been there long enough to start making changes and they were starting make changes now.
Mark: Nice.
Jane: These were and they were they have been following best fleets and they wanna do they wanna use the best practices, but they just, you know, just take some time. And sometimes it does. And what is different about them was that Usually, I see it more gradually. Mhmm. But this time, it was like your last year's answer was a pretty typical answer for a regular average fleet.
And this year, it's like not even the same fleet.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So, you know, what happened to you? But so I know for that, and and I also know that sometimes it is somebody different writing Yeah. Answering the questions, which can go both ways. Mhmm. Sometimes if you have someone better, or someone who does know the company more or someone who's more involved, does a better job or or they take the kind of half thoughts that were in there before and expand on them and it's great.
And then sometimes you get a new person who doesn't know what we were looking for, whereas the person before did. And they were their answers were fine. And then all of a sudden, I got this yesterday with a fleet who's been in the program for a long time where I was like, what happened to your answer? Like, I know I know what you're doing and it's not this. What?
What? And the and we can't we can't be on every single interview and use our historical knowledge of every single fleet. It's really about what you tell us.
Mark: Well, and part of the challenge with that is you have to start wondering, did something change there? Like, is it a case where they really they're doing what we have traditionally seen from them. And on your point about, you know, somebody who knew what we are looking for, what we're looking for is the specific of what you're actually doing and it was in there and it might be that they're not doing that anymore or it might be that somebody didn't like that answer chopped it out and filled it with marketing speak or a bunch of wishy washy stuff that doesn't tell us anything. And we end up having to give a crappier score.
Jane: Even though we know,
Mark: Well, traditionally, you have been really good in this one area, and we would love to continue giving you that score, but you've changed the answer to say that you're doing less. So we have to reflect that in the score. Yeah. And it's like,
Jane: but why?
Mark: You know, you have this poll of I've heard them doing this for so many years. I don't know if they're still doing it. It seems like they change.
Jane: And I think there's a lot of angst about, oh, we didn't follow-up in the interview. Well, it's a hundred questions. You've got an hour and a half.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. You can't follow-up on every single question in every single interview.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: At a certain point, it has to be on the fleets to tell us their story and tell us what doing and we have to assess them based on that. Now in in their defense, every fleet that I've talked to has been really good about understanding that. There's been a lot of cases where I've talked to people and they say, oh, yeah, we're doing all of this stuff and it's just not in there. And they understand that we can't score them on what we can't see.
Jane: It's really funny. I was going through because what we do is we're kind of the supervisory committee where people will do some scoring and then we check it. Yeah. We're or we do it as a group.
Mark: We're the scoring review board.
Jane: We are the scoring review board, which is, I think, more work It's like trying to teach people to do interviews. It's more work. Yeah. But it'll in the long run, it'll be better. So I'm looking I'm looking at an answer going, wait.
Why did why are there points here for this? And so the answer is, well, they're doing this and I'm like, it's not here. Like, it's not written down. I don't see it anywhere. And the and I think mister Trish said, I know they talked about it and I said, yeah, but he didn't write it down.
He's like, I don't know because they were all over the place. And this is the other thing, is if you're not focused on what's the quest like, if we ask you a question in the interview, we want to know a specific answer. We don't want a story. We don't want, like, if we want a number give us the number, please.
Mark: Yeah. Please. Don't give us a story about the greatness of the owner who coughed up a hundred bucks one time.
Jane: Yeah. That
Mark: yeah. Tired of those.
Jane: That's so and what ends up happening is if people tell us stories and the stories are fine in in a certain behave to limit them because you only have you only have so much time. And when you don't get the straight answer, you try and and kinda get it out later, and I'm really good at that. Like, I'm that's kind of my forte. I can take, oh, you said this, this actually goes here, and this actually goes there. But that's just me.
I don't think everybody's good at that. And you have to realize that the interviewer is a human being as well and trying to get the answer to the question. And if you don't give the answer to the question. Even if you have no answer, it's so much better to just say, you know what, we're not doing anything. Let's move on.
You know. Yep. Let's go to where I am doing something.
Mark: Yeah. I have so much more respect for the companies that say we should be doing more in this area. Yeah. And there's been a few. I don't remember the questions, but I I know that I saw that yesterday.
And something I was reviewing is somebody saying, it might have been an interviewer note where the interviewer wrote down, yeah, they they know they should be doing more or they they talked about how they could be doing more and they're looking into it or something like that. That stuff is fabulous. That tells me that there's some self awareness there.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Rather than just trying to paint over it and pretend it's all fine.
Jane: I think the self awareness has increased. Yeah. The industry and not that the industry was not self aware, but they're becoming more aware of things that touch drivers in in like in indirect ways. You know, all of the weird things that we find of you know, drivers actually I can't even think of an example right now. But they're starting to see the same things that we have been seeing for the last ten years and been saying and acting on them without, you know, kind of just on their own.
I think there's a lot of programs in the industry now, like the innovates, CCJ innovators, and there's other awards and things like that that are trying to do the same thing and push people forward. Like, think outside the box, do something different. Don't try don't just do what your benchmarking group says. Don't just do what your insurance group says. Do something that you think is right for your own drivers.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. Well, that kind of leads into one of the other sort of areas that I wanna talk about, and you mentioned it off the top, is the idea of things for the management and things for the drivers, which I had kind of I kind of got to the same place with heard of a different way is that one of the areas that I I feel like I wanna talk about when we do speeches or stories about this and afterwards is a reminder or a discussion about how we are looking at all of this through the perspective of the driver. So if the company has got amazing stuff for office staff and not much for drivers, and they answer the question through the lens of everything they're doing for office staff, it's not really getting them a ton of points because it's not helping the driver. Now in some cases, it is better for the driver to have robust supports for the office staff because that helps the company to be more profitable and a better opportunity for drivers, all of that kind of stuff.
But in general, there is definitely an inclination among fleets to answer it through the context of management and not so much thinking about the drivers. So I notice that the ones where I always notice it are questions about safety program where they'll answer it through the lens of their efforts on the safety program. Not about what the experience is like for the driver and maintenance where they'll give you a whole long list of all of the different schedules for things they're doing for maintenance. But they won't really tell you what the experience is like for a driver. They're not thinking about it through the lens of the driver.
And you notice that when you were doing the natural disaster question, yes, day, I think.
Jane: Yeah, natural disasters, for sure, it's all about what the office does. Yeah. And I'm starting to see, so I'm halfway through the question, and I'm starting to see a little bit of driver inclusion. So when I say that, it's like drive are mentioned in almost every single answer, but they're mentioned as a passive participant of something that, you know, we're going to tell the driver we're gonna reroute the driver. We're gonna do this for the driver.
We're gonna do that for the driver. They talk about their extensive plans. But they don't ever talk about how the driver is involved in the plan. Well, this is where I'm starting to see I'm starting to see a couple of instances of it, but I think that if you have a plan that's going to affect drivers, then shouldn't the drivers be
Mark: It should be part of that. Yeah. That should be something built with the with the advisory board or driver committee or whatever you want.
Jane: There are a couple of fleets that have committees, which I think is going to be some of the higher that's gonna be the higher score. It it doesn't even have to involve necessarily a driver just have people multiple people thinking about it. The communication, I'm not saying it's the highest score because I just don't have that many people who are even talking about drivers as an active part of that. The the one thing that I see and it's not gonna get good points is captain of your ship.
Mark: Mmm
Jane: I don't think that's a really good that's like yeah. Yeah. Driver just you figure it out by yourself. Let me know what happened.
Mark: Well, also, is there anybody who doesn't have that? Because anybody who says the driver is not captain of their ship, they do what they're told.
Jane: Well, no. There are people who say direct captain of your ship, you know we leave it to the driver who has
Mark: Yes. They all do that. They don't all say it, but they all do it.
Jane: Well, to a certain extent, but there's a partnership there.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: The driver does not have more information than the carrier. The carrier has Time to monitor the weather. Find out what is saying on the news. You know, like, having updates for people figuring out where they wanna go, figuring out what customers are doing.
Mark: Well, it's also it puts pressure on the driver. Exactly. It's a lot of pressure on them because the driver's gonna be thinking, well, what if I what is gonna be the implication of my decision here. If I decide not to run and somebody else does, I'm gonna look bad.
Jane: Yeah. I'm gonna look bad? What if I go? What if I have to take a detour and do all these extra miles? Am I gonna pay be paid for them?
What if I get trapped on the highway? We we know that during winter storms, trucks are trapped on the highway. So captain of your own ship is, yeah, that's very nice to say that, you know, you're not forced to do anything, but on the other hand, in a in an emergency.
Mark: Yeah. Where is the support? Yeah. I wonder if that's an example of him just not having the language to describe what they're doing. Because that's one of those things we used to hear all the time in the early days along with open our policy and named not a number because they didn't really have the language to talk about what they're actually doing or hadn't thought about it.
Jane: I think that as more and more natural disasters occur, they're gonna have to figure that out.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And we because we're going to feed this back and probably talk about it again, that language is going to start coming out. So how do what do how do the drivers know what to do? You know, what preparation are there? Are there any practice drills? Does anybody, you know, what does everybody know what happens when there's a tornado or a hurricane or or whatever?
Does everybody go to their places? Do you have remote capabilities? And that was what I found interesting, was that a lot of people only talked about the ability to work from home. Mhmm. That's it.
Yeah. That's like, okay. But what about the drivers? It's happening to the driver too. And what I think the the reason that we get these answers sometimes from the point of view of the office is that they're not that's their daily life.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Their daily life is, well, if there's gonna be a hurricane, then this is how we get to safety. This is how we get to safety. It's not about how the driver gets to safety.
Mark: Right? That's the whole answering from the office and not thinking about the driver perspective.
Jane: The other one that I thought was really, really interesting was the social media.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: There are three basic camps. One is you do social media for marketing and recruiting.
Mark: Sales pitch.
Jane: Sales pitch? Second one is entertainment.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And fleets go all out. Like, there are fleets that are also entertainment centers. Like, they're doing podcasts, radio, video, like, they just have a constant dream of twenty four hour, like their their own little twenty four hour news network where they're actually performing for drivers, but it's very, very one way.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You know, there's a and I have nothing against podcasts. I have nothing against like, I think this is all great, but there's the interactivity. So are you are you just are you just pushing it out? Are you just doing the entertainment? Yeah.
Or are you engaging your fleet? Because it doesn't matter how many followers you have. You know, some of these fleets have they're four hundred drivers and have twenty seven thousand followers, and they're very proud of that. Absolutely. But they don't have twenty seven thousand people lining up to have a job with them.
Mark: Yeah. I found that as well. That people that invest, and there are some that really put a lot of effort into some of these different channels. And it's interesting. They do very well in that specific question and in that specific area.
But a lot of times, they really are lacking in a lot of other places because all of their effort, all their attention has been in that one particular place. So they may have fabulous podcasts. They may have fabulous social media entertainment like you talk about, and they've got all of this stuff happening around that. But then you get into some of the other questions like professional development section or operational strategy.
Jane: For driver feedback?
Mark: Yeah. And they're not they're not really doing very much there. The feedback one is a very interesting
Jane: You've been doing that one.
Mark: I've been working on that one yesterday, and I realized I need to park it until the weekend when I can have focus time. But we changed that question. It was originally
Jane: total work environment.
Mark: How do you know that you're providing the the, you know, the best total work experience or something like that for the drivers?
Jane: That meets the needs of your driver.
Mark: Yeah. Which is really about how do you get feedback to know you're doing the right thing. So this year, we reworded it to be how are you getting feedback from your drivers and what do you do with that feedback? And what has struck me as I'm going through it, is the number of fleets that don't tell me how they're getting feedback. They just tell me all the ways that they tell drivers what's going on.
They talk about communication is so important, and we're so focused on it. And here is all of the ways that we're posting information for drivers. We record a message on a hotline that drivers can get every week and we put out an email newsletter or we post this or we post that, but it's all going to the drivers. Yeah. Nothing coming back from the drivers.
Mhmm. And all of the drivers have an opportunity to respond to that or reply to it or something, but there's not the company soliciting driver opinions. Or there's still a bunch of the well, you know, we have these tools available if drivers wanna use them. We have an anonymous email. There's a suggestion box.
Know, they can come to us with something. So it's kind of that passive. I'm sitting here waiting for them to come and tell me.
Jane: And with social media, it's the same thing. Mhmm. There's so much effort coming from the office to somehow, I don't know, to somehow make drivers I I think people get a little bit too caught up in the their own little stardom, you know.
Mark: It's easy to get blind spot. Get wrapped up and, you know, and and you start this thing with good intentions and you wanna do a good job of it and you get focused on doing a really good job. And you end up just having this thing consume you.
Jane: And you get that social media feedback, you get thousands of followers, like, oh my god. It's working. People are here. Like, they want To see more from us, this is great, but it does not translate necessarily into more drivers. Like, what is it that you're actually getting out of it.
Now it could be that there is some engagement from the drivers. Like, there are some people who have call in
Mark: Mhmm. The
Jane: drivers can call in and stuff like that. But what is really missing is the very very simple private area to talk.
Mark: Yeah. A place where you're asking drivers to give you feedback.
Jane: You don't need have a driver be in charge of it. Yeah. I mean, you don't need anything fancy see, all you need is a place for them to go to talk. So the top marks are on You know, we have a private Facebook group where drivers can go and talk to blah blah blah blah. Or better yet, but there's spouse Facebook group that spouse can go and ask questions and do all of this.
I've been talking about private Facebook groups and Facebook live for, like, donkies years.
Mark: That's the third level then. If the first part was the sales pitch of just marketing, the second one was entertainment.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: And then the third one is the
Jane: engagement. Yeah. And it's not about necessarily giveaways and prizes and stuff like that. That's not real.
Mark: That's entertainment.
Jane: That's entertainment and it's not really it will may engage some drivers but not on a very thoughtful basis. You want people's brains. Like, you want you don't necessarily want them to just be your fans. You want them to be your team. And to move people from a fan base to your team, take some work.
Mhmm. And it's not work that you do yourself, you have to do it with the drivers. So the really cool things that I've seen are WhatsApp is, like, one fleet was using a WhatsApp as a as a a way for their drivers to communicate or it they there or there's a couple of other apps where it basically communication. Anywhere where drivers are given an area to communicate freely is really what you wanna do and also have that engagement with the office. So it's not just drivers, you know, complaining about stuff.
There has to be back and forth between the office and drivers. And so town halls doing Facebook live where you're answering questions as you go, like, some fleets are doing it but not considering that Facebook live is free.
Mark: And around for a long time.
Jane: And easy to do, I'm amazed that more fleets aren't doing it. They're still doing the, you know, the marketing, kind of the marketing focus type of thing, where it's social media. And I remember, oh god, you know, six or seven years ago, where if they use social media at all, we were like, yeah, where to go?
Mark: If they're using it for anything other than posting openings, they're getting a lot. But yeah, it's come a long way. I mean, it's pervasive now. It it is just baked into the DNA of our society. You have to use social media.
If you're in any kind of business function, you've gotta have social media happening.
Jane: Party or marketing now?
Mark: It's not just part of marketing, it's part of HR, it's part of business operations.
Jane: Much as we don't really want it, but
Mark: Well, for the tracking companies that aren't using tools like Slack or other ways of having sort of group collaboration or group communication, social media is the way to go. So, you know, we would have a Slack channel for that. For people to collaborate, and if we needed a space for spouses, we would have the spouses as a single channel guest to come in there and talk. And trucking companies really aren't using that. They're not well, there's one or two that I've seen mentioning using teams for stuff.
So they're sort of going down that road a little bit for collaboration, but for the most part, they're not. They don't have email addresses for their people. They're not really contacting them. They're not taking advantage of those tools. So social media is the next best option.
Jane: It's the easiest and cheapest way to well, especially drivers because most of them are there. Yep. And the nice thing about Facebook live is that you can then sort of transform it into other, you know, into other platform, so you can use it on Instagram. You could probably do a ruthless screen recording and put it on YouTube. It's your own content.
You can do what you want with it. And some people are doing that. Some people are using lots and lots of channels. There's a lot of TikTok going on right now.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. People exploring that.
Jane: Yeah. And that's kinda cool that that they are, you know, like, before people would only kinda use social media kind of reluctantly.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And So if there were new, like, new social media venues, we're like, okay. Maybe if we have time kinda thing, but TikTok is like, okay, we're there now. It didn't take any time. It it was like, you know, TikTok arrived, trucking is there. That's the fastest that I've ever seen trucking adopt anything.
Mark: Mhmm. Yeah. That's interesting. Well
Jane: So we have the three levels. Do you have the three levels that you're seeing in anything else?
Mark: Well, the ones that I go back to were the observations made by Rick when he was doing interviews in the fall that I thought were beautiful. The three levels of maturity of a fleet, which is things we do two drivers, things we do four drivers, and things we do with drivers. And he really noticed that pretty early on when he's doing interviews, there are definitely questions where they say, you know, here's the things that we do, and it's really we're doing this to the drivers. It's kind of one way just dumping it out on them. Then the second level is like, oh, well, we should be nicer to these people.
So here we're gonna do all this stuff for you. Whether you want it or not, we're doing it for you.
Jane: The charity the charity version. Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. The third level of maturity is the engagement with drivers to say, okay, what is it we should be doing, let's collaboratively figure that out and then do it. And I thought that was a really smart observation from an outside outsider coming in to do the interviews for the first time. Starting to notice that. So I'm definitely seeing that in the questions that I'm scoring.
I've I've scored a bunch of sort of the numbers questions and things like that. For now, but I'm I'm certainly seeing that in some of the other program related type questions where there are people that really aren't doing very much or people like even this question on the feedback. There's the people that basically just tell me how they tell driver's stuff. You know, they're doing that to the drivers. We're giving you information.
And then there's the people that are doing it for the drivers as we have this option, we have that option, but they haven't really worked with drivers to figure out what's the best best plan for them. And then the top level of the people that are working with drivers to have some collaboration sort of committees. They've got they'll often have the private Facebook groups, but management will post questions in there to collect feedback and things like that. So they're working together.
Jane: I Everyone should do that. That's such an amazing idea. You know, post some questions that you wanna know the answers to. You wanna know what a driver wants? Post a question.
What do you guys want? Yeah. And I think I have to say one of the things that's driving me up the wall is the the tendency for people to talk about women, drivers who happen to be women as females.
Mark: We had a whole other conversation about that, but the different labels.
Jane: I'm just shaking my head, man.
Mark: Yeah. Well, there aren't very many women in the industry.
Jane: Well, yeah, that's right. There's a girl's in the office and there's a female's driving. I don't know why women is is such a bad word. Yeah. I don't know why I I find it, like, because you don't talk about males.
Mark: What's funny is through this conversation that we've been having for the past couple of months, you know, as as we sort of realize this specific bit of language and the the subtext I have noticed that there are particular cases where people are referred to as male or female in situations where they want to kind of not so much dehumanize them, but remove the personal connection or or and it's it's it's police law enforcement. We're looking for a a male of this height. Yeah.
Jane: When in
Mark: that page Yeah. Not we're looking for Fred. We're looking for a man or anything like that. It's always a male or a female. And it creates a separation.
That person isn't one of us. They're different. You know, the male of the species with this size this weight wearing this outfit. That is what we're seeking.
Jane: It can't be your employees that you talk to, but like
Mark: Well, anytime that happens, Like, I definitely see that with people talking about women drivers as there's a con disconnection there. There's a separation of, well, you know, we have the driver who only got these guys that'll do this or do that, and they're always the guys.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: And we have some female drivers too.
Jane: Can you think about the language? Right? So you talk about the guys? The guys are buddies. Guys are group.
The guys are part of your in crowd. Females are
Mark: Outside of the line.
Jane: Yeah. Like some sort of test tube baby. That's what I I think it's so weird how how lane how they how people use language to like, they don't even intend to, but there's that you know, putting people into categories.
Mark: Very subtle.
Jane: And they don't talk about drivers as people. That's the other thing that kinda drives me up the wall. And this is I've know noticed this for years and years and years that, you know, when people log in to our system, when people use this, we know that the people who use the system are probably drivers, but we don't need to say that they're drivers. They're people. They're people who are using a system.
They're people who are, you know, moving freight. And I think that's why we use in our courses, we use people's names. We don't use we we to them as a driver as an introduction. But after that, we don't say. We don't say
Mark: A forty year old male.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. Or this female driver or and I was telling I was talking to Church about this yesterday. I had a long call with Church yesterday, but I'm very fascinated with language. I think language is super powerful and the words that you choose to use are, you know, make a huge difference.
And you have Suddenly, there are things that bug you that your whole reach out.
Mark: Oh, yes. Oh my god so much. Just keep your day in hands to yourself.
Jane: Because everybody says, reach out. I'm gonna reach out to so and so or, you know
Mark: Yeah. Eight years ago, that entered the lexicon edit. It has been a scourge. That has been a language pandemic.
Jane: Nobody says, call or email anymore.
Mark: Or even contact.
Jane: Well, I like contact. Contact is my go to work because I don't always know if I'm gonna call them or email them or whatever. An email has its own Like, I I'm still hung up on the fact that it used to be a plural noun, but now it has an s on it.
Mark: Yeah. But reaching out is the worst.
Jane: Reaching out wow. This is the worst for you.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Oh, remember we were watching a show and it's like from fifteen years ago or the sixties before anyone ever said reach out and they were all saying reaching out.
Mark: Oh, yeah. We're like, no.
Jane: No one said that. Yeah. And how language evolves, you know? It's it's very and it's evolving so fast now. Yes.
Front because of just, I think, the Internet.
Mark: Yeah. So much changes so quickly. Mhmm. Well, we have to reach out to some experts and get some get some feedback on that. Maybe some female experts and get some feedback.
See, that just sounds gross. We're gonna reach out to some female. So just like, oh, keep your hands to yourself.
Jane: Well, I think, you know, there will be a big step up when people can just call women women.
Mark: I know.
Jane: You know, a girl is someone who's fifteen. Yeah. Women are you have women working in the you have forty year old people who identify as as female, they are called women. Yep. They can they can be called women.
Please call me a woman. I don't wanna be called a girl, a chicken skirt, whatever. Like, I'm I'm a woman. And it's it's so weird. It's like you have to reclaim your, like, just that word, like, just please, I wanna be a woman.
Just like you're a man. Your man is got is good.
Mark: Yeah. I have no response.
Jane: I know. You have all the good words associated with you. Women have a lot of derogatory words. That are associated with that, like, and it's so much easier to find a derogatory word for a woman than it is for a man. I mean, you can't come up with derogatory words for men.
It's you can, but it's easier to be more derogatory towards a woman even when you don't attend it. Yeah. Completely unintentional, which I think is is very interesting.
Mark: Yes. Language has a lot of power.
Jane: Which is what I said ten minutes ago. Yeah.
Mark: I'm summarizing.
Jane: Okay. Thanks.
Mark: Now moving on. Are we doing anything else that isn't scoring? I don't really think so. No. Normally, this would be the part where we talk about other product stuff.
Jane: No. And if we had we had a vacation in that and we scored, and that was it. And it feels like it was just, you know, bang bang bang.
Mark: Technically, we did have time off in there. Didn't we?
Jane: Didn't feel like it. No. Scoring started and it was basically the end of vacation.
Mark: Yeah. Well, in theory, there's other stuff happening. So That will be the next episode, more on that next time.
Jane: This has just been in all best fleets all the time.
Mark: Which I think is kind of an annual thing for us. We're deep in the middle of it. We're gonna have an episode that is devoted to that as we go through it and sort of recap what we found so far and Now the next episode of this, I think we will be probably getting ready to do the announcement.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: So we will have all of the pieces ready there. The scoring will be finished. So we'll probably spend most of the time talking about best leads then.
Jane: As we do.
Mark: Yeah. And then we will be starting to get on to some other things as well but probably still mostly best seats. That is basically our January. We're finding a ton of interesting stuff. Yeah.
Once again, what are we but halfway through?
Jane: Mean, there's just so many things that we still need to score.
Mark: Yeah. We're pretty much finished with the HR strategy. So hoping today we get mostly through operational strategy. Then that'll take us. It'll be a little bit more than halfway through.
Jane: Sounds good.
Mark: Alright. Well, we can wrap it up there. Mhmm. Alright. Thanks everybody for listening.
Have a great day.
Jane: Bye.