Your Drivers Are Talking About You — Use It to Your Advantage

Your truck drivers are talking about you, and the rumor mill is strong. It’s a reality that trucking companies have long known. Managing that rumor mill can help you keep a leg up on the competition.

That requires a dual effort on the part of your trucking company. First, create and build a meaningful employee feedback program. Giving your drivers a feedback tool allows them to work through problems more effectively and makes them less likely to jump ship. 

But even when they can talk directly with your team, they’re still going to talk with peers on message boards, on social media, and even at truck stops. Make that a positive by giving them something good to talk about.

How to Get Drivers Talking to Spread the Positive Word

When your drivers are out and about and interacting with other drivers, either in the digital world or on the road, you want them to create a positive impression about your company. After all, word-of-mouth is an incredibly powerful recruiting tool — and it’s one that can make or break a business, depending on whether the word is positive or negative.

How can you steer the conversation in a positive direction? These tips can help you get there:

Encourage them to talk to you. This one probably seems self-explanatory, but it is so important! While we’ve already established that drivers will be talking with their peers even if you have a feedback program, the information they’re sharing is less likely to skew negative if they have an internal forum for sharing their critiques. Using a continuous feedback tool like WorkHound gives your drivers an offramp to question company policies, ask for clarification and help, and vent about frustrations when they need to do so. This makes them less likely to take those peeves out into the world at large.

Don’t ignore what they’re telling you. Soliciting feedback is only one part of the process. Simply having feedback in hand is useless by and of itself. That feedback has to be put to work in order for it to yield positive progress. Carefully listen to your drivers, reviewing their feedback and handling situations as they occur. When multiple drivers share their thoughts about a problem and the company comes up with a solution, share that action with the entire team. This makes it clear that driver voices are being heard and that your company is taking meaningful action based on those voices.

Provide your team with resources. When new drivers are onboarding, you probably provide them with lots of documents and information about processes, procedures, and company benefits. But you may take for granted that your veteran drivers know all the important stuff, making it less important to provide them with helpful guides, apps, and tools for understanding programs and company protocols. However, arming your entire driving team with resources about the things that set your business apart has two purposes: 1) it helps ensure they understand how your company works and 2) it makes it more likely they can share the big-picture details about why your company is a good place to work with their peers outside the company.

Share their voices. Your existing employees may be your single biggest recruiting tool when it comes to hiring new employees. We know from reviewing feedback from drivers across the industry that they have many positives to share about their coworkers and the companies they work for. Why not take advantage? Ask your drivers for permission to share their perspectives with outsiders on your social media pages and through other forums. Capture their thoughts in printed words, but also in videos and audio recordings. 

Encourage them to amplify your messages. Most drivers are surfing the web and interacting with peers on Facebook and other social media platforms. They’re super familiar with the quick action of hitting “share” or using the “retweet” function. Let your drivers know you’d love to have them spread your company’s message. That’s true both when you share their perspective (in the videos and other posts we mentioned above) and when you post things like job listings or even holiday messages from company leadership.  

Having a meaningful feedback program in place is the first step in giving your drivers something good to say about your company! Sign up for a free demo to learn how WorkHound can help.