The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #117
Mark Murrell: Hello. Welcome to Episode 117 of The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Mark Murrell, co-founder of CarriersEdge. And with me today—
Jane Jazrawy: Jane Jazrawy, other co-founder of CarriersEdge. Hello, Mark.
Mark: And we will start with greetings and a happy Victoria Day to all of those north of the border joining us from the Great White North, and a happy upcoming Memorial Day to those joining us from south of the border.
Jane: So here's something that I didn't notice this weekend because Victoria Day just happened—but there was no fireworks.
Mark: Yes. This is true.
Jane: Normally, everywhere you are in Canada, people are just setting off fireworks randomly in the three or four days around Victoria Day. Any holiday that has traditionally had fireworks—
Mark: Yes.
Jane: There's someone setting off fireworks—usually illegally—but that didn't happen.
Mark: No. Or we were so asleep that the time it got dark and slept right through it. But I don't think there was anything. Usually, we are down by the water, and normally there's people at the beach blasting them off. And then there is the ensuing outrage in the local Facebook groups about all the fireworks—and there was none of that this weekend. So it was very calm.
Jane: No. The rage was about Starbucks closing.
Mark: Yes. And whether it's a good or a bad thing, and all of the crazy things that people would like to have in there instead.
Jane: Yes. I don't care.
Mark: A whole lot of nothing.
Jane: Actually, there may have been a police presence—because they really don't want people setting off fireworks down at the beach. So there may have been—
Mark: There may have been also kind each night, most of the evenings, there was a bit of rain in the evenings. There might have been some of that. But—
Jane: Yes. That was just weather.
Mark: —it was quiet.
Jane: Yeah. It's been unseasonably—well, no, it's been seasonably rainy. When we got here last year—we are in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. And when we got here last year it was unseasonably hot.
Mark: Two years ago, actually.
Jane: Two years. Oh my gosh. Holy moly.
Mark: Coming up on two years since—
Jane: Yes. So we've had all the weather.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: But yeah, we have had all the weather.
Mark: Which might be a day. That might be one day where you have all the weather here.
Jane: What's really interesting is that Victoria is not supposed to have extreme weather.
Mark: No. We don't really have extreme weather.
Jane: Except we did. Over the last two years, there has been extreme weather.
Mark: Well, extreme for the area—not extreme in Canada.
Jane: We had minus 10.
Mark: Nobody else would call that extreme.
Jane: But it is an example—like, we had something that doesn't happen in Victoria, which is minus ten weather. We had thirty-degree weather. So if you're in the U.S., you have to do the conversion, because I cannot convert.
Mark: Hundred-degree weather Fahrenheit—we had that. That was the first year we were here. We had the extremes. It’s sort of settled down now. And now it's always just the weather. It's always a bunch of—
Jane: It's just kinda rainy sometimes.
Mark: Sometimes rainy, sometimes sunny. Most of the time it's sunny.
Jane: But if you've never lived by the water—especially the ocean—you just watch the weather change the entire day. You just have to wait a bit for it to change if you don't like it, because right now it's sunny. This morning, it was rainy.
Jane: Yeah. This morning, it was not very nice.
Mark: It may be overcast and rainy again later today.
Jane: It might be. We may go through all of the different weather bits.
Mark: Yes. Well, the subject of extreme weather brings me to one of the things that was on my list to talk about in this episode, and that is my trip to Florida last week. So I was in Orlando for the National Private Truck Council Annual Conference—the Private Fleets Annual Conference—which they always do in Orlando. They pick a spot and they like to stick with it. So they're always at the Orlando Convention Center—Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.
And I haven't been to Orlando for like a year and a half. It's been quite a while since I've been there—actually, probably longer than that. This is my first time there since we moved out here. And it's far to go—from the top left of the continent to the bottom right of the continent is a long way.
Jane: It's a journey.
Mark: Yeah. It's a long flight. And it is a little bit warmer and so much more humid. I had forgotten what crazy humidity was like until I got off the plane there.
Jane: And your hair immediately springs to life.
Mark: Well, everything just starts sticking to you. All your clothes start sticking to you. And yes, it's a whole different kind of thing. But the conference itself was actually quite excellent. I've started to quite enjoy that conference.
I hadn't been for a couple of years, and it's a different kind of vibe because private fleets—though they're separately incorporated businesses—are kind of a department in a larger company, and often one of the smaller departments. So you may have a company with four thousand employees and they only have forty or fifty drivers. So the transportation is one small bit of it.
They're competing with everybody else, all the other departments, for attention and resources. And it's a whole different vibe. And because of the fact that they're kind of department managers, in most cases, it's really a conference of departmental managers.
It's not as over the top as some of the other conferences that we go to—particularly on the for-hire side. And the executives that are there—sometimes these things are basically just vacations for the executives, done in some resort on an island somewhere, and it's "a business conference."
Jane: So you're talking about, you know, like, the state associations.
Mark: Sometimes state associations or other things on the for-hire side end up being much more kind of luxe in the way they're put together. But this is definitely a working event. I'm assuming they have to justify their attendance by coming back with some really actionable items.
So the breakout sessions are very specific in terms of what to do and specific things that work and don't work. And the exhibit is very big—quite a large exhibit compared to other events in the industry. A lot of things on display there, and people actually going to the exhibit and getting information and looking for details on specific solutions for their problems. So it's a different kind of conference.
Jane: One of the things that you told me—which I think is interesting—is that it follows some other conferences that we have been to where vendors don't get to speak at the sessions. Which I think is—if you're running a conference, you can do what you like—but it's a mixed bag of what you're going to get if that's what you're going to do.
Mark: Yeah. And that's one of the things that's different about this group. The way they do breakout sessions—vendors don't speak, or they're not supposed to speak. It's supposed to just be the fleets talking. And they don't let the media in as well, because a lot of these people doing the breakout sessions have to pass their content through their corporate legal departments and things like that. There are a lot of hurdles they have to get over.
And the last thing those legal departments want is to find a bunch of these comments in some trade magazine—posted publicly, maybe taken out of context or misquoted—and end up having a whole lot of issues.
Jane: Yeah. When you're a multinational company—
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And somebody who works for one little bit in one little state—yeah, it can be—
Mark: A little hairy. But your point about the mixed bag of what you get—yeah, I completely understand why they do this, why they say no vendor speaking. And at the same time, it's good, but it's also kind of a missed opportunity.
Jane: Well, explain why no vendor speaking can be a rule sometimes.
Mark: Oh—because vendors are absolutely terrible. Most vendors cannot stop pitching. Most vendors, if they're doing a breakout session at an event, will not send the person in the company that actually has all the domain expertise. They will send whatever sales rep or marketing person is local to the area. And that is really where the missed opportunity is.
The vendor—doesn’t matter what product or service you're selling—there's somebody in the company who is an expert on that. There has to be, otherwise how are you building and delivering the service? That person is the one who should be speaking. But that person often isn't really comfortable as a public speaker—or they're busy, they just don't want to do it.
So who do they send? They send the person who is going to be there anyway and have that person do the speech. And that person is probably a sales or marketing person who is genetically destined to only pitch—to always be pitching.
You know, that person who has that always-be-closing mentality gets up there, and they can't deliver a presentation that really is good quality content in a general context without drive-by smears of their competition or backdoor brags about their product. They can't ever talk about the subject matter—because they don't really know the subject matter. They only know their product.
That's really the biggest opportunity.
Jane: And they know what they've learned about their product. So it's the features and benefits. It's how it works. It's that kind of thing. It's not about why the product is good for the industry—what changes you might have to make. The bigger questions that we end up talking about. We could spend all of our time talking about features of CarriersEdge, but I mean, that's not very exciting.
Mark: Yeah. I would say there's a real missed opportunity there in terms of how the industry suppliers are serving the industry—that they don't speak about those things. They could be talking about the problem they solve, how they're trying to solve that problem, and what they've learned about best practices. That would be really valuable for people.
That's what we try to do with our webinars—get some of these outside experts to come and talk about the problems they see and how they want to solve them. I would love to go to a conference and have vendors who are actually experts talking about those things.
That's what happens when you have lawyers talking—they're basically talking about the state of things. Or you have bankers and economists—that’s the kind of thing they’re doing. It would be great to go to an industry conference and have another kind of vendor, like a dashcam or telematics person or back office software provider, talking about problems related to the discipline they are focused on and how they’re solving those. That would be fantastic. I've yet to come across that at an industry event.
Jane: I know. Sometimes you get that—usually it's more from, not a keynote speaker, but a person in a general session who might be talking about it.
Mark: That's fair.
Jane: Going back to what you were saying about no vendors allowed—so a lot of vendors are just doing a feature dump of their product. But having the carriers do all the talking is just as bad.
Mark: Sometimes, yes. It's not necessarily better. I understand where they're coming from saying, “We don't want vendors.” And this group is also very interesting in that you're not supposed to mention any vendor names in any of the breakouts, or if they're doing a safety-in-the-round discussion or something like that—you're not supposed to mention any vendor names. So they try and keep it very neutral that way, which I think is a really great idea.
But yes, having the vendors not speak and having the fleets do it—fleets are not necessarily great speakers either. And if they're really passionate about a particular product, or if they are somehow committed or connected to that product, it can end up being worse. Because not only are they not great speakers, but they're even more clunky in the way they're doing this kind of de facto product pitch.
Jane: I think when you end up having better quality is when you tell people what you want them to talk about—and tell them, “Don't talk about your product.” You know, find people who have expertise—which is what we do. We find people who have expertise on the subject, and we tell them the questions that we want them to answer.
Which is not what they usually start with, because they usually start with the list of obvious things.
Mark: Yes. Exactly.
Jane: And we kind of go, “No, no, no. That's not what we're really interested in. What we're really interested in is this.” And they can still talk about it—they just never thought anybody was interested.
Mark: Yeah. So there are definitely ways to do that. It's a little bit more work to put it together, but it's worth it. And I would say this group—the private fleets—is interesting in the way they are very open about sharing things.
Most of the breakout sessions are about an hour long. It'll be thirty to forty minutes of the presenter talking, and then the rest is a discussion with the audience. The audience is very vocal—asking questions like, “How did you handle this issue?” or “We tried to roll this out, but we encountered this—what did you do about that?”
It ends up being really fruitful. Sometimes the most valuable part of those breakout sessions is after the formal presentation has stopped and the discussion begins.
Jane: Yeah. So it's really more about—if you want that discussion—then how to moderate that discussion, which is hit or miss. There are a lot of events, and there's a lot of people talking.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: So you know what I think is interesting in other conferences—and I go back to Collision, which is pretty much the only one that I've been to for a while—is that they had journalists there a lot.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And journalists never talk.
Mark: They had journalists kind of interviewing people on stage.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: That's a good idea. It would be very cool to see some of the industry conferences do that and have some journalists kind of interviewing people. Because, I mean, that's their whole job—interviewing people and pulling out the good content, the good information.
Jane: And we do see in Canada—we do see the journalists, like Today's Trucking and Truck News—not so much James Menzies, but definitely John G. Smith, who will moderate—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: But not necessarily interview. I think I've seen him interview once in anything, and I can't remember what it was. But the moderation is fine, because you have to be able to talk between speakers and things like that. But not so much the interviewing, where you have, “I'm going to talk to you about this.”
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I think that would be a really interesting thing to do—a direction to go.
Mark: Well, there we go. We've solved trucking conferences now.
Jane: No, it's just an idea. It's just a different idea, as opposed to, you know, call for speakers. And then you have the vendors who want to come and speak. And then you have the sponsors who want to come and speak. So, you know, do something different.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: What are other conferences doing? And I think the media is a little bit objective. There are tons and tons of podcasters—and even trucking companies have their own podcasts—and I think that the people who are running the podcasts are getting really good at interviewing.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And have some of them talk about what they find.
Mark: You've given me ideas now for—
Jane: For ours.
Mark: Yes. For me. I know. Okay. Stop talking. And nobody's allowed to use any of these ideas.
Jane: Well, if anybody is listening and they think they can do it—go ahead.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: There's room for more than one person. Or one organization to have a good idea.
Mark: Yeah. This is true. This is true. So it was a good conference. I had a really good time. And what was different for us is—we had two people at events for the first time. Amber and Michael from our team going to one of these kinds of industry conferences, both for the first time. And they both did really well. Very nice to see, and they will be going to others as well.
We know that they're going to the Texas Trucking Show later in June, so we've already got their next show. But yeah, when people do well at shows, they get to go to a lot of shows.
Jane: They get to go to more shows. More shows. So yeah, it's nice to have new faces going to meet the public. So if you are interested in meeting Amber or our new marketing director Michael, go to the Texas Trucking Show, which is in Texas.
Mark: Yes. Michael will be at PMTC—the Canadian version of the private fleet conference. He and I will be there mid-June. And then the following weekend—which I think is like the 20th and 21st of June—is when they are at the Texas Trucking Show in Houston. So that should be a good event as well.
Very different kind of event, because it's just a truck show—driver-focused truck show—instead of a corporate conference. But a really good event as well.
So, second thing that I wanted to talk about—or that was on my list of topics—which I know will be a bit of a can of worms because we've been digging through this for a bit, and this is the subject of English language proficiency. And the hot topic on it—
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Because people are starting to ask questions. Obviously, there are some changes coming to the way that the lack of English language proficiency is penalized. It’s now going to be out-of-service in the U.S.
And so we've been talking to customers, and we've been talking to partners, and seeing what to do about this. And so you have been very busy researching this. What have you found?
Jane: So many things. It is a can of worms. But you just open that can of worms, and now the worms are traveling everywhere. Where do I start?
How about the wrong thing to do—which is: give everyone training.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: I don't know.
Mark: Does the training solve all problems?
Jane: Well, the problem is that this isn't a training problem. There is learning involved in it, but it comes back to the original—can you fix this problem with training? And the answer is no. Not really.
The first thing you have to do—before anything else—is figure out who speaks English and who doesn't, if you don't already know. If you don't know, then that's a real issue. So you need to find out—are there people who are using interpreters? Are there people who are using devices when they're at a scale or something like that?
And then you have to figure out, okay, how many people is this affecting? And what do you do? What are some of the solutions that you have?
So, trucking has this way of thinking, “Oh, there's a problem. I'm gonna get some course. Send it to all my drivers.” They get a certificate, and then you're done.
Mark: Problem solved.
Jane: Yeah. Checkbox.
Mark: Yeah. I'll have a certificate to give to a roadside inspector and life will be good.
Jane: So getting these certificates—whatever they are, these proficiency certificates—means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because the inspector is not going to be saying, “So, driver, where is your English language proficiency certificate?”
Mark: Yeah. It's not like they're asking for a dangerous goods certificate, like a training certificate for dangerous goods, or “Let me see your Schedule One,” or some of your other paperwork or anything like that. They're not looking for that. They want to have that conversation with you, and they’re every single time going to be assessing it on the fly based on the interaction.
Jane: Exactly. They're going to come to the window and say, “Hey, let me see your driver's license. Let me see all your paperwork. Let me see this, this, and this. Now, open your hood, turn on the lights.” They're going to be giving people instructions. And then, based on the response they get from those instructions, they're going to determine whether or not that person speaks English.
And I think right now, the level of annoyance is what determines whether someone gets a fine. I think what's going to happen is inspectors are going to be like, “This person doesn't understand anything I'm saying.” And that will be when the out-of-service happens.
Now, I talked to CVSA. And this is one of the things that happened after we realized this is more of a thing than I thought. I talked to CVSA and said, “Okay, what's happening? How is this going to work?” And the response was basically—they need more guidance from the government or from FMCSA because they have to come up with a way to be fair to everybody in every state.
So it's not just—it's not going to be someone just going, “Oh, you're so frustrating. You can't understand me.” They're going to have to have some sort of guidance on how to approach being taken out of service, because people are going to start arguing with that and putting in—you know, what do you call it when you do the—
Mark: Like a data queue?
Jane: Yeah. Data queue.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So there has to be guidance. It has to be published for all the inspectors. All the inspectors have to know it—just like any other thing they now have to start identifying as an issue and figuring out what passes, what doesn’t pass.
And I’ve seen that process. It can be really obnoxious—like, it's so boring. But they have to go into a lot of detail. Figure out: is there an exception? Why would it be an exception? In what cases would there be an exception? So they go through these regulations with a fine-tooth comb, and it will be the same thing for English language proficiency.
But it will not be a certificate. It will not be a piece of paper. It will be based on what the inspector is hearing.
Mark: Yeah. It's gonna be an on-the-spot oral exam.
Jane: Right. So the first thing to do is assess.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So—how many of your drivers have this issue? How many of them are proficient or not proficient in English? And are they using tools to help them? Are they using Google Translate when they go across the border? Or whatever it is they're doing—find out.
And you can do that through your dispatchers, through a survey, through any member of your office staff just going out and talking to drivers when they come in. I know who has English as a second language on my staff. Do you?
Mark: Oh yeah.
Jane: And I know their level of proficiency. I know how well they can communicate. And there's a certain level that you have to be proficient at to succeed in the office, obviously—but it's the same thing as a driver.
So one of the things that we decided to do is not emphasize the training part of it, but emphasize the evaluation part of it.
Mark: The assessment of the status quo.
Jane: Yeah. And we're working with one of our customers, Kriska Group, in building an evaluation tool, which is going to be audio-based—because the interactions that you have at roadside are audio-based. It's not written. You can't read it. I could probably pass something if I was reading it, but I couldn't pass it if I was speaking it—if it was French. I could read it, but I could not speak it. So there's a very, very big difference.
And we're going to build the tool so that you can easily figure out whether somebody can operate effectively during a stop. And it's all trucking. It's not gonna be, “Hello, how are you today?” It's going to be, “Print out your e-logs,” or “Show me your bill of lading.”
Mark: Or a question about your logs over the pipe?
Jane: Yeah. Or, “Open your hood,” or “Turn your lights on.” And you can imagine—I was talking to Keith Wood from Kriska about this—he said, you know, you don't want to get under somebody's truck and check underneath if you think that the person doesn't understand your instructions.
Mark: Yes, that could be very bad.
Jane: Yeah. And I can understand the inspector saying, “Yes, we would like this,” but I can also understand the inspector saying, “Can you provide guidance on what we should do—the parameters within which we should be operating?” And the problem is that everybody wants those parameters, and nobody's giving them. So it's a huge guessing game at this point.
Mark: Yeah. I can see it being a little bit like—sometimes when you cross the border, they will ask you a series of open-ended questions. And based on not just your answer, but how you deliver that answer, they will decide what their follow-ups are going to be.
And they use that a lot to determine, like, is this person believable? Are they seeming really shifty as they try and answer this question? Can I trust the answer?
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: I think it'll probably be kind of the same thing—where they'll ask some of these questions. Yeah, they'll ask some of the specific questions like you were just giving examples of, but then they will probably ask some open-ended questions to just see: does this person actually understand the conversation, or did they just learn the answer to those specific questions?
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: You know—did they just hear something about logs and now they're pulling out their logs because they understood one word of it? Or did they actually understand what I'm asking for?
Like, if you say, “Open the hood,” do they understand “hood,” or do they understand the full context of what I'm requesting? And from there, they will decide where to go next, and whether or not they need to write this up, or whether it's acceptable.
Jane: And Kriska is talking about using it as a recruiting tool—well, not recruiting, but it's kind of like a test. You know—can you speak English? Can we send you over the border? Can you pass this test?
Or can you pass this—it’s not an official test, it has nothing to do with official proficiency. What it's going to do is give you an indication of whether or not you can function during a conversation at a roadside inspection or when you get stopped.
So they're using it as an onboarding or recruiting tool, which I think is a really good idea. And, you know, if you don’t—but I think you can also use it as a way to evaluate what you've got so far. So if you think you have non-English speakers on your driving team, then you can figure out what the problem is.
And then once you know what the problem is, then you can figure out what solution you're going to provide. That could run the gamut from—you know, going... I don’t even know. Like, if you don't know English at all—
If your English—
Mark: It might be you're not going across the border for a while. You're gonna switch—
Jane: To Canada. You're not going across the border. But what about—
Mark: Yeah. What about the U.S. fleets? Because that's what I found interesting—this isn't just an issue—
Jane: In Canada?
Mark: Yeah. There's certainly the concern in the Canadian fleets that some of their drivers are going across, but we definitely are hearing it from the U.S. fleets as well. We've got a lot of U.S. customers asking questions about this and having some concerns. And it's an issue—yeah, it's an issue for all of them, really, in different regions.
Jane: I think the only fleets that it isn’t an issue for are the fleets that are creating the problem.
Mark: Yeah. As is often the case, unfortunately.
Jane: But everybody who's trying to follow the law and who's trying to figure it out—assessment is the first piece of the puzzle. Then you have to start figuring out what you're going to do. So maybe it is that you are putting people in a—and I would not do an online course.
Mark: No.
Jane: No. Because you’ve got to be able to speak.
Mark: Other companies are going to say, “Here’s my online training for this,” and throw you a bunch of roadsides. And people will pick the most ridiculous multiple-choice tests. And it's going to tell you that this person is proficient in English—and they're not.
Jane: Yeah. And you'd be surprised when they get a violation.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: What you need—if you're concerned about this—is to talk to these people. You need to actually converse with them, have them in a classroom, talk to them, assess their language skills, maybe get someone to come in and tutor them.
Mark: Yeah. I think absolutely the first step is to know what the situation is. And it's not just a binary thing. That's one of the other things people think about—it’s either a pass or fail. Either they're perfectly fine or they're an absolute mess. And that's not the case.
It is going to be a continuum. There are going to be some people that are pretty much fine and only need a little bit of help here and there. Some people that are worse off than others. Some people that seem fine but maybe aren't. And some people that seem like a problem and really aren’t.
There's going to be all variations of responses there. And as a fleet, first step is figuring out what that actually looks like. From there, usually what happens is the answers start to present themselves in terms of what should we be doing about it.
Is this something where we need to be changing the hiring criteria? Is this something where we just need to be changing our routing? Is it something where we need to be running some extra courses? Do we need to bring somebody in to do some tutoring?
Jane: Maybe the fleet managers or dispatchers can be of assistance. There are a lot of fleets that have bilingual—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: —dispatchers. And they can be of assistance in terms of learning a language, and maybe they're the bridge between getting someone who's, for example, fully Spanish to learning at least the amount they need to get through a conversation.
And it might be that a lot of people can function in English better than they think—they just don’t because they don’t have to.
Mark: Well, understanding it and speaking it—two different things.
Jane: That’s the thing. That’s where you need to practice. And when you're talking about an online course—yes, but what online—what are you measuring?
The online course is going to be twenty minutes, half an hour, or whatever—but what did it do? Do you want them to pass a test? What you want is for them to be able to speak in English—to go through an interaction with an officer at the side of the road or in a weigh station. You want them to be able to complete that interaction in English.
The best way to do that is to get them to practice in front of you—in English.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So when they're at the terminal, go through that interaction and see how they do. If you want to do it, the online tool is a good idea. But really—Duolingo or something like Babbel, or whatever it is you use when you want to learn another language—I think that's a great idea if you want people to actually go through more than just the trucking part of it.
But you have to decide: which part do you want them to learn?
Mark: Yeah. The challenge with some of those generic language tools—as excellent as they are—they are designed for somebody who is a tourist in a lot of cases. They're very generalist. They're very much, “Can you tell me the way to the train station?” That's not really what the truck driver needs to know.
It can be useful as a starting point for building conversational skills, but it isn't going to help you answer the question, “Where are your inspection reports for the last two weeks?” Those kinds of things are not going to be covered there.
Jane: Or, you know, “Empty or drain your air tanks.”
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Or—I’m trying to think of what you could do for air brakes—but, you know, “Release your brakes, turn on your lights, I want you to move up thirty feet,” and, “Get on the scale.” There’s a lot of vocabulary that’s very specific to trucking that you're not going to get in a language program.
And in varying parts of the country, you're going to have different ways of talking about that as well.
Mark: So that raises the other issue about dialects or accents.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Right? So you may understand somebody speaking broadcast English just fine. But if it’s an enforcement person that’s got a heavy regional accent from some particular area, maybe that’s more of a challenge.
Jane: If you are a Canadian and you drive—let’s say—and there’s regional dialects in Canada as well. If you're from Ontario, and you—Northern Ontario—and you drive down to, I don’t know, Alabama... Alabama’s got a pretty heavy accent. Or Louisiana—there are some pretty heavy accents.
Canadians tend to be used to those accents, so it’s not as bad.
Mark: Yeah. People who grew up here. But if you are just learning English because you’ve only been on the continent for, you know, eight years or so—
Jane: Yeah. That’s true.
Mark: Just learning English—it can be trickier. And there's another element to this that came up when I was talking to our friends at Sentry Insurance last week. What they're hearing about it—and what they're seeing as potential issues—they made a really good point that it isn’t necessarily just about pure language skills. It's: what do those language skills look like when you're under stress or under pressure?
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Because people will perform a certain way when they're having a casual conversation in the office with a peer or a coworker. But it can be much different when they're pulled over and they've got enforcement coming up to talk to them and they get nervous, and that anxiety comes out—and sort of all that stress—and it can end up where they revert to a comfort zone, where their language skills deteriorate, and it becomes much worse for them.
So one of the things that they were suggesting is focus on helping people to understand what to expect at a roadside inspection. Understand how to interact with the enforcement people when they get into those situations. And I thought that was a great idea, because we did exactly that on the border crossing course—you have a whole module that is how to interact and what to expect when crossing the border, how to get through it successfully.
It isn’t like tricks—it is just best practices. How to engage, what the officer is looking for, how to interact with them. Really good value in understanding that for roadside inspections as well.
Jane: I think that’s—and we talked about making that a future course.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Which I think is a really good idea. For now, that’s why I think role play is a lot better than doing it online. Because if someone is going to be nervous or uncomfortable, they're going to be nervous and uncomfortable in a role play.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You know, if you are going to pretend to be the enforcement officer, and the person who's driving is going to do the interaction—they're not going to be— That's not a relaxing conversation. Even if you know the person—as soon as you get into a role play—it’s uncomfortable. Like, I'm on stage all the time, and I find it super uncomfortable. It's not a nice thing to have to do.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: It's a little bit of work, but it's going to really help. Because—like what you said—get them to where they know what's going to happen. They understand—they're kind of not anticipating—but they know what could be coming. And they're more comfortable with their responses.
And if you do it in a practice where you can be wrong, then you can make the mistakes before you get out on the road and before you're talking to CVSA inspectors.
Mark: Yeah. Exactly. Well, it's a little bit like accident scenes—the better prepared you are for it… you'll never be perfectly prepared because there’s always going to be a whole bunch of variables—the better prepared you are, the less stressful it's going to be. The better you'll be able to perform, or the better you'll be able to handle the unexpected bits of it.
Jane: So it kind of goes back to: know what you're getting into. So the fleet has to know what the level of English is with all their drivers. And maybe it's something that you put on the file—is there, you know, the level of English? And give it a grade even or different levels.
So, level one to five—five being an expert. You’re a three? Okay. So take all your threes and put them in a room and talk about what happens during an inspection and what you should be saying and how to say it.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And the same with the driver—drivers should be trying to figure out how they can up their language skills and not wait for the fleet to do something.
Mark: Oh yeah. And don’t pretend that this isn’t going to be an issue and just stick your head in the sand and hope for the best.
Jane: That’s like one of the first ways you know someone doesn’t speak English—when they don’t respond. And I’ve seen this response from a lot of kids actually, but I’ve seen this response from adults as well—where they kinda do the “uh-huh” or nod their heads—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: But they don’t know what you’re saying. And you can’t—when you’re at a weigh station—you can’t do that. You can’t nod your head while the inspector is telling you to do something. And it’s gonna be really bad if you do.
Mark: So, taking this topic a little bit farther, this is going to be the subject for our June webinar.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Because there is a lot of stuff to handle here. And I think the way you approached it—and I guess the way you and Deanna are going to take it on this webinar—is dealing with uncertainty. So it isn’t going to be purely about the English language proficiency. It’s going to be about what to do when something like this comes up.
And that is a fantastic topic, because people do not know where to start. Like, what you started with here is—they come to us and they say, “Do you have a training course for this?” Well, that’s not always the answer. How do you figure out the actual situation and then figure out a plan?
One of the books we read as a group—Great by Choice—talks about it as: zoom out, then zoom in. Look at the big picture, figure out what needs to happen, and then zoom into the details and get really into the specifics to figure out exactly what you need to do. But you have to start by having an approach to dealing with an uncertain situation like this.
Jane: Actually, it kind of reminded me—we had a webinar on... was it Owner-Operators?
Mark: The Business Skills?
Jane: Yeah. Or was—no, no. It was Coaching. Our last webinar was on coaching and best practices—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: For coaching.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And one of the things that came up was—somebody had said, “I’m having problems with a lot of drivers.” It was following distance.
Mark: Coaching the same driver over and over on following distance. Something like that.
Jane: No, it was more than one.
Mark: Okay—same issue, multiple drivers.
Jane: There’s a bunch of drivers. This problem keeps coming up over and over and over. And your natural instinct is to say, “Okay, I’m just going to spend all my time coaching everybody on following distance,” which you can do, but it’s going to take a lot of time. You’re going to be very frustrated at the end.
So the zoom out is: Why are we having so much of an issue with following distance? And figure that out first.
Mark: Yeah. Is it really the case that all these drivers are bad? You’re having the same issue? Or is there something else that’s contributing to it?
Jane: And it’s the same thing here. That’s kind of dealing with uncertainty—zoom out. That zooming out is a really important part. Because when you're getting into the details and the nitty-gritty of it, you're thinking, “Oh my God, it's so frustrating, so frustrating, so frustrating.”
And then when you zoom out and think, “Okay, why are we having this problem?”—and you have to do it with other people. Because if it’s just you, you’re going to be in your head a lot. Especially if you're the person who is mostly dealing with it.
When you go and talk to somebody else—somebody else who isn't in it—is going to be looking at it from a ten-thousand-foot view. And asking you questions.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And those questions—that’s why being in a group when you're trying to solve problems is a really good idea. You're coming at it from different points of view. And you can start thinking about: Why is this happening?
And in root cause analysis, the five whys are the—you know, “Well, why did this happen?” “Okay, well why did that happen?” “Why did that happen?” And when you get to the fifth why, then you generally have the problem.
Mark: Yeah. And in a situation like this where there's a lot of uncertainty, you have to zoom out and kind of say, “Okay, well what can we do?” We don't know this answer—but what else can we answer? Or what things can we figure out about this situation in order to make more effective decisions?
Jane: And what can we control?
Mark: Yes. What parts are within our control? What parts aren't? And that goes back to the known knowns and the known unknowns and all of those things—that could go down a whole different path.
But it’s going to be a good webinar.
Jane: We have a thing—you and I—where we game it out.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: We do a lot of that. A lot of: “Okay, if we do this, what do you think could happen?” Or, “Okay, that's one likely scenario. What about if we did this? Then what’s going to happen?” So we have a whole bunch of game plans that we can choose from.
Mark: And we balance each other—because I will always have the most optimistic outcomes, and you will always have the most pessimistic.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: And together we find sort of the range of possible outcomes. And then in the middle, we figure out what it looks like—what the continuum looks like in between those.
Jane: You need to have a worst-case scenario.
Mark: Oh, for sure.
Jane: And you prepare for it. And you hope for the best case. But you do need to have that conversation with somebody about, “Oh my God, what does this mean?”
And it's nice that—you know, I'm kind of glad our customers are talking to us about it. Because we are the people who are not in deep. You know, they're looking at us for the ten-thousand-foot view.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And they are the ones who are in it and up to their—you know, they're in the fifty-foot part of the swimming pool. They're underwater.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So it makes sense that they're trying to figure out a game plan. But you don't need to wait for us. You can do that yourselves.
Which is why it was cool when I was talking to Kriska and I was talking to Eugenia Churilov—about this. And she said, “Oh, I'm glad you called because I'm thinking about this.” And it was great because, you know, we're both kind of at the solution part of the, “Okay, what are we going to do with this?”
Mark: Yeah. Well, it's going to be an excellent webinar. And it's obviously a hot topic. And I think that kind of brings us to the end for today's episode.
Yes. We have lots more that we'll cover in the next episode, and I think we’ll probably have an update on this issue as well. But for now, I think we are good for today.
Jane: Alright. Have a good day, everybody.