002: The Four Pillars of Fleet Success - Stakeholder Satisfaction

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Well, welcome back for round 2. Today we're talking about stakeholder satisfaction. All right. And this is one of the 4 pillars of fleet success. We defined those last week. Stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management. Right. And so this is, this is the first pillar that we're going to talk about. Second episode. And we thought first we got to define this, right? We have to define what does stakeholder satisfaction mean? And we all kind of got together. And shame on me, I totally forgot to introduce my other guests. I've got Jeff Jenkins with me again and Steve. Welcome to the show.

Yo, yo.

Hello, hello. So, Jeff, definition: stakeholder satisfaction.

Living up to the expectations of those who depend on the job you do.

Right, pretty clean-cut. It's all about managing expectations, right? Like, what are— what is it that your people are expecting of you? Living up to them. And, you know, because they're really depending on you and your job, whether you're a fleet manager, a technician, You know, if anybody in fleet management, you have quite the job, right? And there's a lot of people that you impact, right? So one of the things that we got to do, I think, right up front is define stakeholder, right? Like stakeholder is kind of a— it's a different term. It's not shareholders, right? We're not talking about owners. It's not, you know, just your employees. It's not like— it kind of defines a wide variety of people that are impacted by what you do.

Well, you have to manage up, down, sideways. I mean, those are all your stakeholders, anybody you touch.

Yeah. So one of the things that I like to do, like an exercise I think that's a really good thing to do, is think about, you know, sit down and map it out, but think about your organization. You know, maybe draw like two circles. You can't see my hands, but draw two circles on a piece of paper, right? And think about the people that are immediately impacted. By the job you do, right? And what is it, you know, who are they? What job are they in? What role do they serve, right? And so, and then in the next circle, think about the people that depend on them to do their job, right? What we're doing is we're kind of identifying our primary stakeholders, right, the people that are immediately impacted by us, and then secondary stakeholders, which are people that are impacted by the people we impact, right? It's like 2 degrees of separation, if you want to think of it that way. And so you kind of map this out, right? And Jeff, what are some things you think about, you know, when you're looking at your past organizations? If you were to do this exercise, who are some of the primary stakeholders that you'd be putting in your center circle?

Yeah, I mean, the main primary is going to be your technicians, your mechanics, your drivers, your fleet managers. Really the people I think that are within the organization itself, right? That's your, that's your primary. You can also consider your customers as your primary as well, even though they could probably go into both buckets. They can also go into secondary because it's that, hey, I've got the people that work for me and then they touch and they influence the customers as well. So really anybody that works with you, I think you just right away throw in that primary bucket.

Especially like if you're a corporate fleet, this might look a little bit different than if you're a government fleet, right? Where you have paying customers, they're absolutely going to be in that primary bucket because anything you do is going to impact them.

Right.

You know, government fleet, Steve, you know, like your primary stakeholders probably look a little different. What do you think?

Not too much different, but I mean, government fleet stakeholders are, you know, I mean, department heads, drivers, I mean, it's really kind of your police officers, right? Like police officers, same, same, same people basically. Your mechanics, your shop personnel.

Okay. So I mean, and then your secondary, like with, you know, government, like your taxpayers are going to come in here at some point, you know. Do you think secondary, primary, where would you kind of put those?

You know, that's a tough one because ultimately that's your whole goal is to serve the taxpayer, which is all of us, you know. So But I'd probably say they're probably secondary, maybe tertiary out there. I mean, I think we need to do everything we do has to keep them in mind, right? Because they're ultimately the one that pays our salary. They're ultimately the one that, you know, make sure that we're still funded, you know, as an operation.

So I got a question. So you mentioned tertiary. Would you have a tertiary bucket or would you just have a primary and secondary?

I think you totally could, right? And I think it might be a good idea to do that third layer, you know, and that could represent, you know, level 3 to level 100 if you want, right? Because you want to get too complicated with it, you know, you want to keep it simple. But, uh, I mean, think about people like employees and their spouses, right, or their families. Where do they fall in, right? If you think about taxpayers, well, how far down that rabbit hole do you go, right? So I like the idea of having that. Kind of a third ring that represents anybody else that's touched by the work you do, right, that could be affected. I mean, we talk about, I think last week we mentioned, you know, what happens if you have an accident, right? You've got a vehicle that's in an accident. You know, you think about stakeholder satisfaction. Well, what happens when your vehicle is in an accident with a taxpayer as a city employee? Well, now you've directly impacted a stakeholder and suddenly they're not out on the periphery, they're immediately right there in the center.

I was just thinking of a tertiary might be— you'd mention a family member, a spouse, you know, their impact on our primary or secondary, right? Someone comes to work one day and they're having a problem, and maybe they're affected by something that's outside that radius that we were talking about. Yeah, you know, it could really mess up, uh, you know, the way things are happening at your workplace and Well, and you just brought up a good point.

It's not just the people you impact, right? But it kind of can bounce back at us, you know, not quite an echo chamber, but like the ripples come back where they can impact you. Right. And understanding how those waves can move back and forth, you know, from you out and from them in. So I always like doing this exercise, right, because it helps you kind of map out and figure out like, who do you really need to be most concerned about? Who do you need to keep in mind and just be mindful of? You can't forget that they exist. And who is out there on the periphery that you need to be aware of but not necessarily spend a lot of mental energy on? I think one of the cool things as you do this, you're going to realize really quickly stakeholders are just people, right? They're people with emotions. They've got their own fears. They have their own anxieties. They've got their own problems that they're dealing with. And their problems aren't necessarily your problems, right? And so one of the key parts about stakeholder satisfaction is understanding what their problems are and how you impact their problems, right? Are you causing problems or are you helping solve problems, right? And so, you know, I think being able to see it that way too is it makes the work real.

Well, I think you need to see them as people, you know? I mean, you need to know their name. You need to know a little bit about their background, possibly, especially if they're your primary stakeholders. You know, I mean, if it's an employee, do you know their kid's name? Do you know their spouse's name? Do you know what they like to do? The more you know about your stakeholders, I think the more success you're going to have in making them or helping them be satisfied.

Yeah.

You know, well, the more they know you care.

Yeah, exactly right.

And that's the thing. If they're not just a number or someone that's going to do a specific job for you, if they know you care, typically people are more likely to do a better job and to be more committed to what's going on. At the end of the day, it is a people business.

Yep.

Right. And if you take care of people, you respect people, they're, they're going to do the same to you.

And the same goes in return. I mean, if you know who they are, they're more forgiving if you mess up or make a mistake. Because they realize that you're a person as well.

So, I mean, I don't make mistakes, Steve.

I don't either, unless you talk to my wife.

And so it's like, you guys are hitting on this, right? It really becomes then about the relationships, right? Right, about having good healthy relationships with every one of these people in this circle, right?

I remember years ago, I was a young fleet manager and I was working with an outsourced provider and We were talking about this kind of issue and he said, you know, ultimately all this comes down to relationships. That's it. You can have contracts and you can dot the i's, cross the t's, but ultimately it comes down to a relationship. And that's— you get just as much or little out of that relationship as you put into it.

All right. So we kind of defined who our stakeholders are. What's next? Steve, what would be your next thing? You're looking at this whole map and you're talking about stakeholder satisfaction. What's the next thing you go do?

You got to figure out a way to measure it, first of all. I mean, I think that it doesn't do any good to have any— I mean, how do you even know if they're satisfied or not if you can't measure that outcome? If I was a fleet manager and as I, as I was, the first thing I'd do is I would put together some type of advisory committee or something that, that would kind of be an umbrella over my stakeholders so they'd have some participation.

So you probably want to go talk to them, right? Yeah. You want to go hear what they're— what matters to them.

Exactly. You have to have a sounding board somewhere. Otherwise you'd be stabbing in the dark trying to keep them satisfied if you don't listen to them.

Yeah, so it's probably before you figure out your measurements, like part of figuring out your measurements is just go have a conversation with them, I think, right? You know, go have a conversation with, you know, your head of— if you're in a city, go talk to the chief of police, go talk to your fire battalion chief, go talk to public works director, right? What is it that makes a difference in your job? Like, what do you want from fleet? You know, what is it that you want to get out of this? Trucking?

What's important to you, right? Not me, but whoever you're talking to, your customer. What's important to them? And then how do you measure what's important to them? You've got to know what somebody— everyone has a different objective, everyone has a different goal when it comes to their daily tasks and their daily jobs. So we need to help them achieve those goals. We need to make sure that they're staying out of hot water with their organization. So let's find out those hot buttons and then what can we do to help out and to improve upon those hot buttons?

Yeah. And I think as the fleet manager, understanding what role you have and ways that you could improve, help them improve their standing with their constituents, right, with their customers. I mean, this was the whole thing when we first sat down and talked about fleet success, right? It stemmed from this concept of customer success, right? Which was really not about you being successful, but about your customers being successful. And so as a fleet manager, it's really not about you. It's about your customers and your end users, right? The people that depend on your fleet and upon your vehicles being available and reliable and there to do the job they need to do.

You know, it's funny, I always sit there and I think that the easiest thing that you can ever do is to communicate with people. But the thing that most people fall short on is communicating with people.

Yep.

Right. It's just a conversation. It's asking questions. It's giving honest feedback. It's listening. But most things that go wrong happen because of the lack of communication or the misinterpretation of that communication.

100% agree. Absolutely.

As you're saying that, I was just thinking about when I was doing fleet management consulting, we would often put together focus groups of employees, you know, and that way we would learn how the operation works. I remember several times, in fact, one of our customers, I remember a focus group where we pulled everybody together, and that's the first time they'd ever been talked to or asked about their job, or because it just wasn't important, you know, to some of the, the management at that particular operation.

Well, they probably didn't realize how much of an impact that was having on their ultimate customer, right?

I mean, just ask them simple questions like, you know, tool allowance, uh working flexible shifts, things like that. They got their juices flowing. They said, yeah, nobody's ever asked us about things like this. So I think you can't underestimate communication or miscommunication.

All right. So, Steve, we talk about tips on delivering on that stakeholder satisfaction. And Jeff, I think it is— it's all about communication. I think when we talk about the tips on how we improve it, right, like, what are some ways that, that we can both measure and improve stakeholder satisfaction? You know, in your mind, you mentioned bringing on like an advisory council. How did that help? Like, what did that do for you?

Well, I think the first thing it does is that you make sure you're not doing things in a vacuum and you actually have people that you can talk to about issues. Problems, things like, well, things like policies, procedures, you know, I mean, anything that you do as a fleet manager, you're going to impact somebody. So you need to present those to this body and have them vet that out so that they— because it doesn't do you any good to put policies in place if they're not going to follow them, you know. So it has to be a collaborative effort to have that happen.

Yeah. Make sure they have an input, make sure they've got a voice, right? That stakeholder voice and because the decisions you make are going to impact them and it's going to impact their drivers. And who's going to complain about it when you're trying to enforce it? Right.

Right.

Well, it's going to come back through those channels.

So I always remember that, you know, you can, you can be collaborative, you can be a car czar, you know, and the car czar is not a very happy position to be in because it all falls on you then. But if you do it in a collaborative way with a fleet advisory group, then everybody, that whole stakeholder group, has a, you know, has a stake in that process.

Yeah.

So it doesn't come back just to affect you.

I think one of the biggest lessons that I learned, you know, and we've done this a lot here at RTA in our executive meetings, right, is getting people to weigh in, right? Because if you don't weigh in, you can't buy in, right? Then that's just, that's a huge piece. And so you do, you've got to get those opinions so that they feel heard, validated, And then once they feel that, like, okay, now I can buy into the decision because I had a part in that decision-making process, right? Yeah.

Well, and what's important to you is not important to me necessarily, right? Or important to Steve. Everybody has a different point of view when it comes to what's most important. So unless you get all those collaborative minds together and you hear out every different thing, you're never going to be able to understand what is the most important thing or things that you need to do.

Right. I know for us here at RTA, like, we did that. We created a client advisory board, right? Because we did, we wanted more client feedback. We do meet, we do bi-monthly, you know, so we were meeting with them every other month. You could do the same thing with your fleet, you know, set up an advisory council, meet monthly, quarterly. You figure out from them too, because, you know, they're going to have a say in that, how often do they want to feel heard, right? How often do you want to meet with them? And have those kind of meetings. And they don't have to be long, you know, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, but it's a great way, like a lightning rod event, right? It's a great way to bring in, oh man, we've got these things that have been happening, I'm going to bring that up at the next advisory council, right? And it's, you don't want to let things go too long because then they start festering and then they're like, oh no, you know, Steve's doing this thing over in fleet and he's not listening to me anymore. It's a great way to bring everybody to the table and say, hey, What's been happening? What's changed? How are we doing? What do we need to fix? What do we need to keep doing? And it keeps those lines of communication wide open, right?

I think it's important also to define what the purpose of that is, you know, what their actual role is and how you're going to collaborate and work together.

Yeah.

So you have a common ground when you're actually establishing that advisory group.

I agree, but it's also important to not only listen to that feedback, But when you receive that feedback, you don't have to necessarily act on it, right? Because it may not be the best thing, but to at least acknowledge it and make sure people understand that they— what you said, we get, right? We understand it, and that may not be the direction that we go, but at least we're listening, right? And then communicate as to why it may not be the direction you're going.

So kind of employing those active listening skills that we've always been taught.

Exactly.

What do we call that? Tactical empathy, right? You listen, you engage. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I totally I can stand in your footsteps and understand why that'd be important to you. Now here's what I'm going to be able to do about it, right? They feel heard. That's that, you know, you can't weigh it, you can't buy in if you don't weigh in, right? One of the other things that I think, like, we've done, and I think this is an awesome idea because I've seen this play out in another county, is this idea of a CSAT, right? For us, whenever you hang up the phone, right, you get off the phone with our tech support team, we sent out a quick survey. Hey, how was your service today? Right. And it just shows up in your email inbox and it says 1 through 5 stars. And it's super simple. You click on any one of those stars and it automatically records your response. And then it'll ask you a follow-up, you know, hey, do you have any comments that you want to submit with this? Right. But it's just super frictionless, very quick, 1 through 5.

Right.

And you just put in your 5-star review and then we get that immediately. Right. So it's immediate feedback, real time. Um, and for us it's been huge being able to collect that type of feedback, you know. I mean, we talk about our 5-star service because we've been able to collect it. We manage it, like we embed that into our culture, we embed that into our training programs. And so all of our techs, in fact, we have this up on a board, right? And they can see all these reviews that come in, and if they get a 4-star, they're immediately like, all right, what do I need to do different? And it creates like this almost real-time coaching competition. And it's a little bit of a competitive nature, right? Like, you always want to be the top dog, right? And so when you're a 4.93 and somebody next to you is a 4.95, that's honestly how close these scores are back there. But they do, they're constantly, they're hyper-aware of it, which means that when they're on the phone, they're always thinking 5-star service, 5-star service. Like, how do I just keep upping my game to the next level?

And your stakeholders, they see that too.

They feel it.

You know, and I was just thinking about that last night when I came in on an Uber. Would you ride with somebody that had 2 or 3 stars?

Right.

Or would you say, hold on, I'll wait for the next driver.

Depends on how many are available.

Right. How late at night it is. Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But that totally thing, you know, I remember reading an article in Government Fleet about Sarasota County and they had something like this, you know, and they just use something really simple. It like, I think it was like a Happy or Not kiosk or something, right? and it's this tablet, and they put it right beside their, their door where the drivers come in and go, and they just ask, "How was your experience today?" Right? And it's got 5 smiley faces on it, super simple, totally non-intrusive or anything. As you're walking out the door, you just tap it, right? And they can engage, they can figure out like, "Hey, how are our drivers feeling?" and "What's the employee sentiment like?" Right? And they can gauge how their customers are feeling about the job they're doing. You know, now that kind of format, you're not gonna get any specifics. You can't do any follow-up per se, you know, versus like a survey that we send out. We can do some follow-up with it. But what a great way to know where you're at. You know, think about if you didn't have that type of tool, you'd have to do a totally different way of collecting that data from your drivers, and it might involve, you know, phone calls and doing, you know, committees and action teams or whatnot. So simple sometimes, you know, just a quick little tablet on the way out the door. You know, how was it today? And then if you see that sentiment going down, all right, what do we got to do to bring that back up?

I know we're not talking about intentional culture on this particular one, but that's ultimately stakeholders weigh in in that pillar as well. And I was thinking about the thing we do every week. We do the little check-in and we have those little smiley faces, you know, and I think that's a good opportunity to see how your morale is, how your people are feeling about their job, because ultimately their morale is going to affect your, your customer, right? How they feel or how they take care of the customer. Yeah.

Well, and isn't that awesome too about stakeholders? It's not just customers, right? You know, you could also do that same type of, hey, how are you feeling today survey for your employees, for your techs.

Yep.

You know, and engage the mood on the floor, on the shop floor, or in your driver pool, or, right, like just any of your employees. How you feeling today? Right? What's going on at home? How are things happening? Right? And if you see that change in sentiment, all right, what do we need to do? You know, does somebody need to have a conversation? Do I need to go, you know, have a one-on-one with somebody? How do I help kind of bring that back up? Right? I always like, you know, we talk about different stories and things like that in here, right? And we've had some good ones so far, but What are some other stories that you guys have about stakeholders and your engagement with them? Either ones where you've totally wowed them, right? Like great stakeholder satisfaction stories, or what I think is probably more common is the ones where we know we did something wrong, right? Like we heard that squeaky wheel whine, we heard the pain that we caused because usually people are quick to address negatives or quick to bring negatives to light.

But that's actually a good point because sometimes if you put a lot of stake in your feedback, it might be overwhelmingly negative because a lot of—

at least at first if you've never done this before—

it's positive. People don't usually come out and tell you positive things. They're very quick to address the squeaky wheel, you know. So, but that's, uh, that's just the nature, I think, of people. We tend to be that way. I mean, you look at the news, everything else seems to be a little bit negative.

Yeah, you know, but I always think there's room for improvement. Whenever you hear negative, that's always just an opportunity to improve, right?

Well, and it starts at the top, right, on the improvement. So I worked at a company where the only bad thing that you see online in the reviews, you go to Glassdoor or whatever, was the maintenance department. How it took too long, how things didn't get fixed, how the mechanics weren't very friendly. Now it was older equipment. I mean, you know, probably average age of fleet was 5 to 7 years. But it was just the overall attitude and the lack of follow-through and just discipline when it came to that fleet. So drivers would always be upset based on the fact on how long it took going into the shop to get something done. A PM, just a regular A-service, took on average 10 hours.

Huh, wow.

Which is crazy, right? Everybody that knows how long an actual service should take looks at 10 hours like, what is going on? It's because there was no consideration to that end stakeholder, right, which was the driver. The driver had to get back out on the road. So instead of fixing the problem and having some type of proper management or policies and procedures in the place, in the shop, what the owner decided to do was let's go ahead instead and have spare trucks available sitting around for drivers to hop into when their truck was down for 10 hours at the shop. Well, what's the problem with a spare truck? One, it's usually a piece of shit, right? It's not a very good truck. Everybody gets in it. It's not kept up, right? Those break down all the time because usually they're your older trucks. You're not going to have a truck that you're still making payments on that's newer as your spare truck, let alone— it's going to— yeah, exactly. It's going to, you know, so let's Band-Aid this with let's just throw a bunch of spare trucks at the problem as opposed to fixing and creating efficiencies inside the shop, right? That's not listening to the stakeholders. So now not only are the drivers upset and pissed off, they never want to come to the shop because it takes too long to get repaired. And when your truck is in the shop and finally gets out, most likely there's something else wrong with it because they didn't fix it. Because all I'm going to do is do this A-service, I'm not going to look and see what else may be wrong with it.

Bare minimum.

Yeah, we're going to do the bare minimum, right? So now your driver's upset, their dispatcher's upset because now the guy gets back in a truck, a truck breaks down, or it's not ready, or it's taking too long. So that driver's not making money. That dispatcher is held accountable for not getting that productivity on that truck. Right now, that driver's family's mad because they're not on the road, they're not making money. So they have to stay out longer to try and make up for it. And it all comes down to the fact that, right, we're not considering other people and those stakeholders. Right. Customers are upset. Your loads aren't getting delivered because your drivers are broke down. So there's a whole ripple effect. Now you've got some 3-year-old in Minnesota who's upset because they don't have their Lucky Charms because Sam's Club ran out because we didn't go ahead and get it delivered on time. Right? So you've got this whole ripple effect just because of the inefficiencies inside of a shop.

Yeah, I feel like there's something like a butterfly effect here, like butterfly flaps its wings in China and suddenly, you know, a 3-year-old cries in Minnesota and you're like, what?

Yeah, that's not even the story I was thinking of when we start talking about this topic, but it just hit me just like, hold on a second, I just came from a place to where the maintenance part was terrible. Yeah, and it was all because we, and I would say we because I was part of the executive team, we didn't consider what was at stake with everybody that was involved in that process.

Yeah.

You know, and interestingly, I came from actually a pretty good maintenance where we had a program called One Fleet here in Arizona, and we considered every stakeholder when we built that program. Everyday operations in the fleet would huddle together. They would look at problems. To find, you know, root cause to road calls, how to eliminate them. I mean, it was really a great collaborative effort, you know, and you get everybody involved in that process and solve the problem. It works for the benefit of the whole company.

And how was that turnover, right? How, what's the end result?

Less turnover. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Which was important because drivers and mechanics are two key areas where you have shortages right now.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

And that was our biggest problem was our turnover.

Yeah, right.

And it's because we didn't take care of those guys.

Yeah, we even measured turnover. Oh, of course, against the industry, you know, we had to be better.

Well, and Steve, and that was a refuse company, right?

Right.

And you don't have refuse trucks on the road, suddenly stuff starts piling up, literally, very quickly, right? And then you got customers calling in like, hey, you know, nobody picked up my load this week, I'm overflowing, like, what do I do? You know, they're all in a panic because it's so— it absolutely is critical. I love that. Yeah, I know at RTA, like, I remember when I first started, uh, gosh, I was probably just— I'd just become the CEO, and I remember getting a phone call from a customer, one of our largest customers, and they called me up and they're like, you know, Josh, we haven't heard from anybody over there in over a year, you know, and I'm not really feeling like you guys care about who we are and what we do, right? In RTA, for a long time, we've We're very good at being a reactive company, right? Kind of like you in maintenance, you'd be a reactive maintenance. Oh, broke down, we're going to fix it right away. But keeping it on the road, that's a different story, right? It requires a different level of effort to be proactive. And we realized really quickly, you know, talking to this client, what they were expecting and going back and managing our behavior to that expectation and suddenly shifting. And we got a lot more proactive with this client. And then it started trickling into our other clients and us getting more proactive. And even today, we're still rolling out ways that we can become more proactive and trying to further that ripple, you know, to the point that it's not just 1, 10, 50, but now how do we hit 500? How are we going to scale that now to 1,000 clients and make that proactive feeling come through? And it, it all comes back to— I mean, we said it right at the beginning— it's living up to the expectations. What are the expectations? And are we meeting them, right? And communication goes so far in understanding those expectations and then even managing them. If you're not going to live up to them, let me tell you, it is so much better if you can reach out and let somebody know you're not going to meet a deadline or you're not going to live up to that expectation and apologize for it and try to figure out how you can do better next time than it is just to ignore it and be dark.

I'd be willing to bet that almost 90% of your churn is because somebody didn't talk to somebody.

Right.

Yeah, just something simple like that. We didn't keep in touch, we allowed a competitor to come in that was more warm and fuzzy or something, and we lose our customers, right? I mean, I don't know how many shops got outsourced for these kinds of things.

Right, it's just communicating.

Yeah, the lack of communication.

One of the things I learned quickly too was this idea of fundamental attribution bias, right? You ever drive down the freeway and you get cut off? What's your immediate—

I'm usually cutting them off.

That's how I was doing it. So you get cut off, what's your immediate reaction?

The middle finger.

Right, that guy's a jerk. What a terrible person. Right, like, you know, like he's totally just the worst person ever, right? You don't cut people off on the freeway. But when we do it, what's our reaction? Whoops, didn't see you, sorry, like I'm totally late to my meeting.

It's my reaction is you should have been going faster.

But we usually, like, we have this flip, right, where, you know, if it, you know, if somebody else does something to us, well, it's a bad character problem, right?

Right.

But if we do something bad to somebody else, it's usually the environment. We blame the environment. You should have been going faster, right? The speed limit is this, right? Like, we're not, you know, like, I didn't see you, it wasn't my fault. And that same thing happens in the absence of communication, right? If you don't communicate, fundamentally, I'm actually fundamental attribution bias kicks in and it kicks in hard and you're left to fill in the blanks, right? You think about like your customer has to then try to assume what's your intention? What are you trying to do? And well, if you don't tell me that there was a problem, well, you must be hiding it, or you know there's a problem and you just don't want to fess up to it, or, you know, like it immediately you start filling your head with all these negatives in the absence of truth.

Right?

And which is just communication. And, you know, the lack of communication leads them to let their imagination run wild.

Well, I mean, this— and the same thing is, I mean, if your boss doesn't talk to you for a while, right, you have to assume he's mad at you, or he's mad at you, or you're on the chopping block, or— yeah, you know, it's just— it could be he's just busy, his wife just went through surgery, something happened, you know, in his family, you know, you don't know. Yeah, you know, I always wonder how the remote workers work. Because there's such a lack of communication sometimes.

It takes a lot more effort to be intentional about the communication. Yeah, and I think this is true— you just mentioned it with your boss— but I think it's true for employees too, right? It'd be interesting to go back to that trucking company and find out, like, you know, how do you guys see yourself impacting these drivers? Do you understand the impact you're having, and do you care? And like, because you can make an assumption that, man, they just don't give a flip, right? But maybe they're thinking, I'm working really hard and I've got all these things happening at home. And there might be a whole circumstance at home that we don't even know about.

Well, they might be just like Jeff said earlier, they might have a poor environment. Might be, you know, there's no lighting, it might be dirty, dingy, you know, there's no parts or tools. Yeah, right. It could be all kinds of things.

So it's the blame game all the way around, right? That's what you'll find.

Yeah.

Everyone will— no one's at fault. Everyone's got some kind of a circumstance. But at some point someone has to take ownership, and usually that happens from whoever's managing the group. They have to take ownership of those.

It's either proactive or forced, one way or the other.

I think there was one— Jeff Bezos talks about this all the time, right? And I think this is something for us to consider as well when we talk about stakeholder satisfaction. When you think about that officer that gets involved, they have to come and work in the line of duty every week. But what happened at home before they went on shift that day, right? Your technician comes in, what happened at home before they came on shift that day? And he talks about, you know, like there's not this thing of work-life balance, right? Because it's a total misnomer because it assumes there's a trade-off, right? Like, well, I can work or I can have a life, but I can't have both. But instead, it's more like a work-life cycle because what happens at one will impact the other. And if we're truly thinking about stakeholder satisfaction, What happens at home impacts work and what happens at work, right? The environment we create, who, how people feel cared for or looked after or heard will then impact at home as well. Right. And so you think about like those maintenance, that maintenance department, what kind of impact was that having on their life at home? What kind of impact? You mentioned it with the driver. You know, now their family isn't seeing that driver because they're having to work late to make up for the maintenance department taking 10 hours on a PM service. And I think that work-life cycle, you know, that really hits home for me about why stakeholder satisfaction is so important, because it really is bigger than just delivering the goods, delivering the mail, you know, making sure that that squad car is out. It's making sure these people get home safe. It's making sure that their families get to see them again, right? And, you know, life's too short to have it be anything other than that.

Well, and I found most people actually come to work to do a good job. I don't think anybody wakes up in the morning and decides, well, I'm just gonna go there and I'm gonna sabotage everything and I'm gonna screw up all the stuff that I'm gonna be working on. I think when a person gets to that point, there was something that caused that, that generated that type of an attitude.

And it got ignored.

Yeah, and it just festered and went on.

And there wasn't enough communication about it, right?

Yep. Yeah.

Well, any last thoughts as we wrap up today's episode?

I don't actually. I think it's been good.

I think the thing I would say is I'm always amazed by Chick-fil-A, and I know I don't want to name drop, but when I go there and they say my name and when they take care of me—

this is an unofficial sponsorship—

and they say, yes, it's my pleasure, just, you know, I think about, you know what, what a simple little customer service engagement that is, right? But it's so effective, you know. I feel important there.

And just to flip to the words, right, it's not 'you're welcome,' I'm not projecting on you, it's, it's 'my pleasure.' Yeah, it's about me taking pride in my work.

Yeah.

And they are so efficient.

They are efficient.

Like, seriously, if Chick-fil-A ran most of everything in the world, we'd be so much better off.

And I said, one by my house, I look at it every day, look, man, look how far those cars are lined up. Yeah, they get them right.

Yeah. They had that story of that Chick-fil-A manager out in, oh, somewhere back east. And he, they brought him out to consult and help run, it was either a vaccine distribution or COVID testing.

It was the COVID testing.

Yeah.

And how efficient it was when he got there.

You're like, man, this is awesome, right? Stakeholder satisfaction. You have to know what's important and how to do it right. So, all right guys, well, this has been a lot of fun. Make sure you tell your friends and coworkers, tag us on social media @fleetsuccess. Subscribe to the Fleet Success Show wherever you're listening to podcasts. Next week, we're going to talk about intentional culture, right? About what it means to intentionally create the type of culture that you want versus accidentally living in a culture that gets created for you. So with nothing else, we'll see you guys next week. Thanks again.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.