About WorkHound: Where Our Passion for Effective Employee Retainment Strategies Came From
WorkHound was founded in 2015 by Max Farrell and Andrew Kirpalani. The two are problem-solvers, and the issue of high turnover in the trucking industry inspired them to look at potential solutions. They narrowed down the issue to a fairly common one: communication. But unlike many industries, the trucking industry’s barriers to communication were innately different. The nature of trucking is that employees are rarely in the same location as the executives or each other. Distance, a lack of trust, and other factors meant drivers often felt isolated from company leadership.
Page Contents
- We Bring Practical, First-Hand Experience to the Table
- The WorkHound Difference
- This Anonymous Feedback is the Cornerstone of WorkHound
- Who Can Benefit from Anonymous Feedback?
- Our Process
- An In-Depth Look at WorkHound’s Overall Approach
- The End Result: High Turnover
- The Solution
- How You Benefit from Partnering with WorkHound
- We Provide More than Just Data
- Contact WorkHound Today to Get Started
We Bring Practical, First-Hand Experience to the Table
WorkHound’s team does more than work in the office—we get first-hand experience with our clients. Max started this tradition by doing a ride-along with a driver early on. He learned what it’s like to essentially live in a truck for days, how lonely the long stretches of road can feel, and what challenges trucking brings.
He was able to view these challenges through three lenses: the first-hand experience he was getting let him see what it was like to be a driver, his academic background in sociology allowed him to see the overall social view of trucking, and his drive as a problem-solving business owner helped him see solutions to these issues.
Max and Andrew encourage all of WorkHound’s employees to do a ride-along and to visit other employees to learn about what they do first-hand. We want to see first-hand what employees do all day, what their work environment is. That allows us to see where those employees may face struggles and helps us develop the tools needed to facilitate communication and gather the information you, as a business owner, need to begin implementing solutions.
The WorkHound Difference
In addition to having first-hand knowledge of what your workers go through, WorkHound’s approach to collecting data is also unique to the company. We gather anonymous feedback from employees. We have years of this information to analyze. With over 70,000 team members on our platform, we can draw trends, predict issues before they occur, and help you identify what’s working along with what may need a little work.
The key to our process is that feedback is anonymous. Workers can choose to identify themselves, especially if there is a serious issue affecting them, but it’s never required. By staying true to this promise, your workers are able to provide unfiltered feedback without the fear of damaging their reputation or, worse, their job security. They’re honest, sometimes brutally so. But this honesty is what you need if you are serious about improving your retention rate and employee job satisfaction. You can’t fix what you don’t know about, and anonymous feedback is key to learning where those problems are.
This Anonymous Feedback is the Cornerstone of WorkHound
While we may add new tools, expand our offerings, and create new resources, WorkHound will always remain dedicated to providing an anonymous voice for your employees. We truly believe that is the key to bridging the communication gap that occurs in the trucking industry and in many other industries.
Who Can Benefit from Anonymous Feedback?
Any business could benefit from our method of gathering anonymous feedback. While WorkHound was founded with the goal of helping the trucking industry reduce its high turnover rate, we did build this system to assist anyone with frontline workers. You can implement our processes with remote workers, drivers, warehouse crew, and many others. Any business within the supply chain and beyond can benefit from partnering with WorkHound.
Check Out Our Case Studies to See How We’ve Been Helping Companies Like Yours!
“If I was starting a trucking company today, I’d have WorkHound on board. If you aren’t using it, you’re missing the boat. You’re missing an opportunity. For the value you get, it’s a no-brainer.”
– Eric Hanson Vice President of Driver Recruiting & Retention, J&M Tank Lines
Our Process
The WorkHound process is a repeating cycle. Each rotation in the cycle follows the same steps:
- We sent a text message to your workers asking them for their honest feedback and other information.
- We receive the feedback and share it, unfiltered, with you.
- We also sort feedback into easy-to-read reports for your executive team.
We repeat the cycle weekly, allowing us to continually learn what your team wants and needs. By having this information, you’re able to make informed decisions. There is no more guesswork involved. You know exactly what employees need to stay with your company, and you can take steps to meet those needs.
In addition to the regular reports, your dedicated customer success manager will meet with your product owners weekly, and with your full team every 90 days for an executive review. During these weekly meetings, we will help you address emerging trends and how you can best take action on employee feedback. The executive reviews expand on these weekly meetings. We will present metrics regarding the previous 90 days, the challenges that came to light, and the success you’ve experienced. Our account managers do not rotate clients, so you will have the same point of contact at each weekly meeting and executive review. This means your account manager will become familiar with how your business operates and what struggles you’re facing, allowing them to offer more specific advice.
An In-Depth Look at WorkHound’s Overall Approach
Now that you have a basic idea of our process, let’s take a deeper look at what WorkHound has to offer and how we can address the problems our customers have.
The Problems
Our customers typically have problems that fall into one of three categories:
- Company leadership doesn’t know what employees want.
- Company leadership makes assumptions about employee needs.
- Company leadership only hears from a small number of employees.
All three of these categories can result in the same thing: employees’ needs are not met, leading to many employees becoming dissatisfied with their jobs. They will then begin looking elsewhere. This is what leads to a large turn-over rate, which in turn can cost thousands of dollars per lost employee.
Making Decisions with No Information
In the first category, your executives simply don’t have any hard data to use when determining what your employees want. This can lead to making no changes in the way you currently operate. Your employees get nothing because you don’t know what to provide them. This results in employees feeling neglected and unimportant.
Making Assumptions
It can also lead to making decisions based on what you believe employees want. Making assumptions about the needs of front-line workers is always a risk, but when those workers are drivers or remote employees, that risk increases. Your leadership team isn’t in the same work environment. You don’t have the same point of view as these workers, and that can lead to making assumptions that are simply not true.
This isn’t done maliciously at all. However, it can lead to a feeling of mistrust from your employees. Trust, especially in the trucking industry, is hard to build and very easy to destroy. Because of the high turnover rate, you may have drivers who have worked for a dozen or more companies, and every one of those companies may have made the wrong assumptions about what drivers want.
Making Decisions Based on a Few Employees’ Input
The third category, hearing from only a small number of employees, can actually be the most dangerous. This is because it leads to a false sense of security. You believe you know exactly what your employees want because you have heard from a very small number of them. However, these employees may have concerns that only affect them. Their needs may not be the needs of the majority. Other employees may begin to feel as though they are working in an environment controlled by a tyranny of the minority.
Companies that have an open-door policy often end up making decisions that only benefit the few employees who speak up. Again, these employees may have no malicious intentions. They are simply voicing the concerns that affect them. Unfortunately, again often due to broken trust, some employees may not feel like they can speak up. They may have faced retaliation in the past for voicing valid concerns. They are hesitant to come forward now for fear of that happening again.
The End Result: High Turnover
No matter which category your employee decisions fall into, the end result is that a large number of your employees feel as though they are not being heard. They have real concerns, but those concerns, for whatever reason, are not making it to you. This results in employees becoming more and more dissatisfied with their jobs. They start looking for other employment and eventually leave.
This high turnover rate has serious consequences for your company. Every employee who leaves must be replaced. This means investing time and money into advertising open positions, holding interviews, putting people through the onboarding process, training them, and much more. This costs time and money. In fact, replacing one driver in the trucking industry can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000. That money quickly adds up.
The Solution
The solution to dealing with high turnover is simple: communication. Your employees have wants and needs that must be addressed. Some of these items may be impractical, of course. However, again it comes back to communication. Often, employees simply want to be heard. Even if the conversation isn’t what the employee wants to hear, the fact that there was a conversation at all helps build trust. Employees know that leadership has heard what their issues are and has responded.
Anonymous communication goes even further in building trust. Employees can say what they want to say without fear of reprisal. Even if there is no intentional pushback, everyone is human. It’s very possible for someone to unconsciously begin to dislike someone else for voicing an opinion. Anonymous feedback takes this factor out of the equation, which is the main reason so many employees prefer using this method.
With this feedback, you can empower your leadership team to make informed decisions. There is no assumption or guesswork—you have the hard data in hand that shows what employees want. Distance, hesitation, or fear of repercussions no longer play any part in blocking communication, either. You can receive feedback from your entire workforce, not a small percentage of it. You know what the majority of your workers want. You can take action on this feedback, leading to a happier workforce and improving your retention rate.
“When you lose touch with your drivers, you really lose something as a company. I wanted to be able to have access to the drivers, their feedback, their input, and what was going on in their lives without it being filtered through anyone else. WorkHound fit that need perfectly.”
– Joyce Siqueira Vice President of Operations, Freightworks Transport
How You Benefit from Partnering with WorkHound
WorkHound is here to help you implement this anonymous feedback solution, analyze the results, and formulate a solution. Working with us will benefit your company in a number of ways. The biggest is, of course, retention. By improving communication and providing you with the information you need to make informed decisions regarding your employees, fewer will look to leave the company.
While a higher retention rate in itself is a major benefit, it’s the benefits that this triggers that truly impact your company. First, as mentioned earlier, you save time and money. Hiring for an open position, onboarding the new employee, and giving them the mentoring and training they need to become comfortable doing their job isn’t cheap.
If you’re losing dozens or even hundreds of employees every year, this eats up a large part of your budget. You may spend half a million dollars or more every year just in hiring and onboarding. That is a significant amount of money that could be used elsewhere. This greatly impacts your bottom line and your profitability.
An employee who has been with your company for several years has a good feel for how things operate. They know the most effective ways to do their job. They’ve formed working relationships with their co-workers and supervisors. They’re more efficient, which in turn means they can work smarter, not harder. This all benefits the company. They also understand how the company works and, because they feel empowered to speak up through anonymous feedback, can offer ideas on improving processes and reducing costs.
Your customers also benefit. They can form a relationship with the employees they often work with. They get to know each other. The employees become familiar with each customer’s industry, company, and unique situation. This allows them to better serve those customers. Customers also become used to working with the same employee. They know what information that employee needs to get the job done, and they know the best way to share that information.
Your company benefits from this relationship, too. Customers no longer see your company as a faceless entity or as a business with a rotating door. They have a face to put to the company name. The longer they work with the same person, the more your company feels like a stable, sure bet. There’s a consistency there that only boosts your reputation.
We Provide More than Just Data
While the biggest benefit to working with WorkHound is the large amount of anonymous feedback we provide you on a regular basis, we do more than that. We analyze this data into helpful reports. We meet with your daily users once a week, and every 90 days with your full team to provide assistance in utilizing the data and to answer any questions you may have.
With our years of experience in gathering feedback, we’ve also noticed specific trends and common issues. We’ve compiled this information into a series of ebooks and other support documents that are available to all of our clients. This research bank provides generalized information that you may be able to apply to your business. You can use it to begin formulating specific employee incentives and other solutions, then use the personalized feedback from your team to customize those plans.
WorkHound can also serve as an emergency communication service in extraordinary times. While we typically only communicate with employees to ask them for feedback, we do have the capability to broadcast alerts and other emergency messages during severe weather or other unexpected events.
“WorkHound has helped a lot with operations. Anything from minor things to larger situations. We’ve been able to take those comments and suggestions and use those improvements and acted on them.”
– Maribeth Knueve Vice President of Dry Van Operations, Marten Transport
Contact WorkHound Today to Get Started
In short, WorkHound has identified the following:
The Problem: your employees don’t feel heard, and your leaders are making decisions without knowing their wants and needs.
The Solution: Work with employees to boost communication and give them a voice that provides the information you need to make vital company decisions.
The WorkHound solution: Implement an anonymous form of communication that allows employees to share their thoughts, both positive and negative, and provide that necessary data.
With our years of experience, we’re ready to help you begin identifying and addressing issues that are directly impacting your retention rate. WorkHound has grown to quickly become a trusted and influential company in our industry, and we want to put our skills and knowledge to work for you.
Reach out to WorkHound today to discuss how we can help you boost your retention and grow your company.