Driver Culture is Defined by Communication

Have you ever thought about the role of a feedback program for your trucking company’s driver culture? For trucking companies, gathering feedback and taking action on it can fall pretty low on your large list of priorities.

But did you know that a feedback program can be the engine that keeps your trucking company on the road?

Using a feedback tool as the foundation of your overall human resource efforts can help you achieve your goals in a meaningful and efficient way. (Read: Cut that to-do list in half!) 

Let’s talk about why.

What Trucking Companies Are Looking For

When companies want driver feedback, what’s the reason? What we’ve learned is that regardless of the answer, what they get is even more important than simply feedback.

“Companies are looking for access,” says Katie Love, Marketing Manager at WorkHound. “By nature of the business, leadership teams are miles away from their drivers — and from the inner workings of what drivers want and need. Gaining access to drivers and what they’re looking for in a driver culture and their daily work helps business leaders stabilize that environment and improve the overall culture while overcoming the rumor mill.”

As a continuous feedback mechanism, WorkHound provides trucking carriers with essential access. Knowing what drivers truly need and want helps remove assumptions, which are often expensive time-wasters.

“The best way to start any decision-making process is just to ask for insight from those who will be most impacted,” Love says. “If the decision is going to change the way things work, it’s all the more critical to ask drivers for their thoughts.”

There’s an added benefit to a tool like WorkHound, which offers drivers a chance to share their concerns anonymously. Because feedback collected through WorkHound is anonymous, drivers provide more unfiltered, honest input than they’d share in other formats.

Building Your Driver Culture Around Feedback

So, back to our overarching question: How does a feedback program fit within the overall culture of a business? 

“A feedback program is a point of entry,” Love says. “It can be a part of a company’s story. If you’re branding your company as an inclusive or family-oriented environment, you need to have a feedback mechanism in place that enables your team to help you truly communicate and include all stakeholders in your decisions, especially drivers.”

Basing your company’s decisions on what drivers actually need can help you trim costs, both in dollars and in time. And there’s another benefit, too: Drivers who are involved in the decision-making process will feel more valued, which in turn improves retention.

“Assumptions are typically made in a silo,” Love says. “You make them based on what you feel, based on your own opinions and biases without evidence. Offering an outlet for feedback allows you to collect information from all the drivers across your organization. You won’t need to make assumptions, which can help you skip a lot of steps because you know what drivers actually need.”

A Problem-Solver That Fits Within Your Programs

In many cases, when you’re implementing new programs or tools for your business, it involves some restructuring to accommodate. That’s perhaps what makes WorkHound most unique — there’s no need for an overhaul to add WorkHound as a service.

“We don’t work like consultants, who tend to come in and overhaul the way your team works,” Love says. “We simply aggregate information that already exists because it’s provided by your drivers. Companies can move at their own pace, setting expectations with drivers, and our team is present for support. Our tool helps companies amplify a driver culture that might already exist.”

That means that you can incorporate WorkHound into your existing program, whether it’s currently a success or needs improvement.

“It can be difficult to admit that things are broken, especially if you’ve put a great deal of time and effort into a system that isn’t working well,” Love says. “I think that’s why our customers are so happy with Workhound — we’re not here to poke holes in your driver retention plan; we’re here to inform it.”

Build your company’s culture around a meaningful feedback program. Sign up for a free demo to learn how WorkHound can help!