Episode 007: Moving on from Covid

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. Welcome to episode number 7 of the Fleet Success Show. Joining me today again, got my co-host, Jeff Jenkins.

Hello.

And welcome back, Steve Saltskiver.

Thank you.

That was a vacation.

It was good.

Awesome. You, uh, you've got a nice little walking boot going on right now, so this has been fun for you. Fun here.

I wish I could say I partied really hard and got this broken leg, but I did not.

So tell you what, man, growing old, not for sissies. That's what they say.

And there's no good story behind it, but you're gonna have to think of one to make up.

Yeah, I'll have to tell people. Absolutely.

All right. Hey, so today our topic is like the best topic because it's never been talked about before. Uh, COVID.

Wait, what?

What's that?

So we kind of figured, hey, this topic's been a little bit overplayed. People are tired of talking about it, are ready to move on, and we totally agree. And so we want to talk about moving on, right? What's next? But before we get into it, we kind of wanted to like just rip up the COVID bingo cards. Here's all the words you're not going to hear us say because too many people have said them. Things like new normal, right?

Unprecedented.

Unprecedented. Unprecedented circumstances. Dude, come on. It's a precedent. It's been out here for a year. There ain't nothing not unprecedented about this, right? If you haven't figured out how to move on from that— anyway, rant over. Abundance of caution. Out of abundance of caution, we are going to keep doing this podcast, right? Flattening the curve. You will not hear us flatten the curve anywhere in this session.

Well, at least not anything longer than 14 days, right?

Right. So here's the deal, if you hear somebody scream, it's because we're doing a little slug bug road trip action in here. Somebody says those words, pop, get a little dead leg action. So, uh, yeah, COVID, we're moving on, uh, you know, we're, we're moving into this next phase, right? Things are opening back up, and the question, you know, that we've been tackling over the last couple months, and I think kind of the country as a whole is tackling is this idea of, all right, well, how do we get back to work? And I think what's interesting about this is while the rest of the world is figuring out how do we go back to the office, fleets like, what do you mean? We've been at the office the whole time, you know? So how do you— how does what we've learned and what other companies are learning, how does it affect fleets? What are some of the things that they're struggling with that you think would be mines, you know, like little minefields that they're going to have to navigate?

Well, I think the available workforce out there is probably the biggest one. When you talk about what everyone's gone through, you know, the government's still giving out a lot of money. So in doing that, people aren't looking for work. And you can see those signs all over the place of people that are working, that are looking for skilled labor, not even skilled labor, just really any labor to come in. And that's going to be no different for fleets. There's a huge mechanic shortage and technician shortage out there. And it's not just because of this and just because of, you know, the extra government funds people are getting. It's also because there just isn't that skilled labor that has, you know, gone through school and acquired those. So that's probably in my mind the biggest thing when it comes to, hey, let's get back to where we need to be, but you can't do it without actually having those qualified people working for you.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, you talk about the technician shortage, definitely something that was happening before this, and now all of a sudden it's totally exacerbated, right? Like it's a bigger situation than it was before. And it's not even just, you know, technician shortage. We went out to eat the other night and they were looking for, you know, just busing people and waitresses and they couldn't find them. Yeah, all the trades. All across the country.

All trades are affected.

You've got trades, you've got, you know, even in, here we are in high tech, we're having trouble. Like, hey, how do we just fill some of these technical positions, even low-skilled positions? You know, we just need receptionists. Finding positions, finding people that are willing to work and do it. It's been interesting how the labor market has shifted so much from just a year ago, um, you know, and it's not like they all went away and just, you know, stuck their head in the sand because not everybody was working for minimum wage anyways, but Man, what a— what a— just a tectonic shift in the labor force over last year.

It's crazy. It makes you wonder how people are making a living, right, or actually able to exist with all that's going on. It's a real boondoggle just in the country right now. It's just so weird and so different. Have you seen those signs on the internet that have been posted about like restaurants just completely closing down because they can't find—

they don't have staff?

They don't have staff. Or signs that say, hey, please be patient with us. Yeah, we're working with what we've got. We can't hire anybody. No one wants to work anymore. So it's crazy. But yeah, it definitely— I mean, it trickles to fleet, it trickles everywhere.

There's some people have been off now for almost over a year on unemployment. I saw that the feds are cutting some of that off or starting to.

And it will start weaning.

Right.

So I mean, that'll help a little bit to get—

Yeah, get going.

Yeah, get going.

So I think it's curious though is, you know, where's everybody else, right? Like where is the unengaged workforce? You know, because you look at the unemployment numbers like, you know, they're going to start coming down here, but unemployment doesn't include disengaged workers, right? When you've got workers that could get a job but have stopped looking for a job, um, you know, getting those, getting an idea on how statistically significant those people are, what's that number look like, I think that's a big shift of why you're seeing not You know, we've got all these job shortages, you know, in industries that didn't ever have job shortages before. Technicians and drivers are one thing because it was always like that, or at least it was a problem beforehand. But now it's more— it's system-wide.

I'm going to add on top of that the supply chain shortages we've got with the chips and with the parts.

And boy, that came out of nowhere.

Yeah, I mean, that's becoming epidemic now. It's shutting down over by my home. Back in Salt Lake City that I just came back from, there's lots filled with trucks just sitting there. Can't do anything with them.

Yep. You know, so they're not finished yet.

Yeah, but when you, when you tell everybody to stay home, don't come to work, these people aren't going to these factories, well, what did people think was going to happen? I mean, it's pretty common sense. Hey, don't go to work, right? I, I was working at a trucking company in Illinois during this And the owner, he was like, yeah, we're not, we're not playing this game. Everyone's coming to the office and you're working. And everyone actually thought, well, probably 80% got COVID because of that. But guess what? They got their 10 days out, they came back, and now everyone's back to work. And, you know, he was functioning better than most because he was requiring people to come back to the office. And sure, people were pissed off, right? They wanted to work from home or do whatever else and have a much easier life. But, you know, the work's got to go on. And there's something to be said for being able to collaborate with the people you work with face to face and not having to sit there and wait for a Zoom call. Not to mention all the wasted time and hours people have at home when they're actually not engaged with their job.

It's much better being in 3D.

It is.

I mean, I have to agree. I— but, but, you know, I don't think they thought very far ahead on the supply chain thing. I mean, they're in a rapid mode making toilet paper and you know, things that were necessities for people, but no one really thought far enough ahead to think about auto parts or chips.

Yeah.

So chips, or, you know, but if you think about it, I mean, what were the auto manufacturers doing then? They were making respirators, right? They'd kind of shifted their entire, their entire mode. Yeah. So now we're going to reap the, you know, that problem.

Respirators that aren't needed anymore.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting. You know, we were actually talking about this on the NAFAB boards, right, about how is this impacting fleet. And you talk about the specifically the vehicle shortage.

Right.

And now all of a sudden you're not going to be able to replace vehicles because they don't have inventory to replace them with. And so we're going to be extending the life of vehicles as we come back, you know, and that's going to be interesting on the budgets and it's going to be interesting on maintenance cost and Although there is a bright side to this.

I mean, during the COVID there was a lot of people not utilizing vehicles.

True. So they had a lot of supply, so they could extend the life of them anyway.

Yeah.

So naturally.

So there could be some benefit to that, unless they're already extending the life beyond their life models, and then now you've exacerbated that problem.

Yeah. Well, of course, if they're already doing that, it's, you know, It was a problem beforehand. It's just a little bit bigger problem now. Jeff, you were talking a little bit about, as people are coming back to work, just this angst that they have, right? And like that they had at your last company. I've been hearing a lot, you know, I know it's just what I've been hearing. I haven't seen a lot of it yet, but this idea of this great resignation that's going to happen as everybody is shifting back to work. And, you know, more and more employers like yours and kind of like we've done here are requiring, hey, we've got to come back into the office, right? We've got to come back and be in person. That's in the skilled workforce and, you know, kind of the high-tech white-collar workforce. Anybody that could have worked from home, now that they've realized, oh, I can do my job remotely, now that I'm being required to work from the office, I'm going to look around and start looking for a different opportunity. Right. And how does the Great Resignation, A, how does it impact fleet? And B, you know, like, how do you help overcome it?

Well, I don't think it impacts fleet because, like you said in the beginning, most of those people were already working and they were not working from home because they couldn't work from home. You can't be a mechanic and work from home.

There's no way.

Right. You just can't do it. You're not bringing vehicles to your house and working on them in your driveway. That's just not the case. When it comes to office staff, kind of that management and whatnot, I think that it will probably have some effect. But the Great Resignation, the moment the people realize they have to get to work, I don't think it's gonna happen. I think right now, because there's a lot of noise about it, the people are feeling emboldened by that. But at the end of the day, if a company wants you to come to work, guess what, you're going to come to work. And if you don't want to, go choose another place to work. I don't think it's going to change much. I think you'll probably maybe see an increase of about 10% that will allow people to work from home, but it won't be much greater than that. And people aren't just going to quit left and right because they can't work from home. They still have to make an income. Right.

It'll be like anything else. It might be a differentiator, you know, for an employer that has a difficult time getting somebody to fill a position. And like in our case, you know, with receptionists, for example, or low-level support tech jobs. You know, we may have to, to lean somewhere to the, you know, doing that at home or something else. But that's no different. I mean, I've had a niece that's been working from home for 20 years for JetBlue. Nobody knows the difference. I mean, she's— they think she's on the same switchboard with somebody next to her.

Yeah.

So some are, some are just more advantageous to do that, but others are not. But then you have to lose, in our case, like, you know, what are those perfunctory things that you lose? You know, putting files away, you know, signing for UPS shipments.

There's still some logistics involved.

Exactly.

So hands-on activities. Yeah. So, you know, and I know one of the big things for us with remote versus in-person is like communication channel. You know, like right now we're sitting in a room, we're talking to each other, we can see each other's facial expressions, we can read the tone of the conversation. I could tell you, being on Zoom, obviously we've all experienced that Zoom fatigue and where you can't really tell, oh, is it my turn to talk? Like, oh, I had something to say, I gotta raise my hand, right? So somebody knows I'm about to insert myself in the conversation. I think once people understand what they've been missing— we actually went through this here, right? As we said, hey, we're all coming back to the office. And yep, there was some gnashing of teeth. There was like, oh, why do we have to do that? I said, look, we just got to reset status quo, right? Like, we got to remember this is what we were doing before. We're going to go back to it. So we remember why we were doing it that way and then we'll reevaluate, right? But let's at least— we're not going to, you know, stick with the default of everybody works from home. We're going to set the default again, reset status quo, and again, go forward from there.

And I think there's some industries, I mean, and I think we're one of them. You know, we're the tech industry. There's a lot of creativity. There's a lot of impromptu meetings, collaboration. Yeah. And all that that needs to happen. And Zoom's just not conducive with that. I mean, you try and set up a Zoom room or—

it's got to be real time too, right? A lot of times I think our guys, you know, they get into async, right? We call it asynchronous mode. It's where you might ping me at 10 AM and I'll get back to it at 1 PM when I'm free.

Right.

Well, that's 3 hours where you were waiting on an answer but didn't get it because I didn't know how important it was to get you that answer. And you say, well, at least you didn't have to go interrupt me. Yeah, but if it's a 5-second question, that interruption could save a lot of time. Right. And it might save him from going down a path that he didn't need to go down. So that collaboration, that real-time collaboration is really key.

Yeah. You know what my biggest issue with all this is, and maybe I'm just a And we have a lot of issues with them, but— well, I do, but maybe I'm an eternal pessimist on this. I just don't think people were working. That's my biggest deal. I don't think people were focused. You know, if your job requires you to work 8 hours a day, I don't think people were working 8 hours a day. I think people were working 3, 4 hours a day, and they were doing the rest of whatever they wanted through that time. It takes a very dedicated and special person to be able to work from home and to be able to say, I'm going to stay focused at at home. I'm not that person. I know that about myself. I have to come to the office. If I'm at home, guess what? There's a TV sitting there, there's a program I wanna watch, there's a book sitting there I wanna read, there's something over there that's gotta be fixed, there's something there that's gotta be cleaned, right? I'm gonna go hang out with the kids, do whatever. But you— it's hard to stay focused when you have all these distractions at your house. I mean, I applaud people that can actually do that and stay focused, but most people aren't like that. So all of a sudden you take people who aren't very disciplined and you say we're going to shove this whole workforce to go out to and work from home. Guess what? Your return on those people and the amount of work that they're doing just went right downhill.

Well, I think it's funny too is some of them don't understand that that was even happening, right? Like, they don't have the self-awareness to realize, oh, you mean like changing my kid's diaper in the middle of a phone call is not a good idea, right? Oh, that was just multitasking, right? Like, we had somebody out feeding the horses in the pasture, you know, they had Hold on a second, you know, how do you go out and do that? And it is, it takes that discipline to recognize, okay, I've got to be able to focus on my job. And you get an interruption at work, well, it's a work-related interruption typically. Get an interruption at home, and I got 8 kids at home, right? That's 8 different sources of distraction, you know, coming in wanting to talk to Dad. And it's awesome to be able to do that, but at what cost, right? Like, every time it takes me away from this is what I need to be doing right now, right? And being here in the moment versus being there in the moment.

I can actually be pretty disciplined about work, but it's that other distraction where someone— you're home, you're convenient, your wife needs you to run to the store, you know, or watch a kid for a minute or whatever that is. That's the thing I struggle with working from home because it's really hard to say no when there's just a few of you there, right? You know, and then, you know, so you don't get up and you don't say, hey, Josh, I got to take off for an hour, right? If you're your boss, you know, and so then you got to make it up on the back end, or at least you should.

If you don't, it's the honest—

to get back.

Yeah.

To get back at Jeff's point where, you know, are you, are you being totally productive? You know, some people don't care.

Yeah, they don't. Well, and they won't say anything to their boss. They'll just disappear. It's that 3-hour gap you're talking about. They don't. They just disappear and they're not around. You're like, what's going on?

Yeah.

I mean, I remember seeing people that were showed away, right, just in the messaging, and they've got nothing in their calendar and they're away for well over an hour and you're like, hmm, that shouldn't happen. What's going on over here? What are we, what are we doing? But you don't want to, you know, you don't want to second-guess and you don't want to micromanage and you don't want to call people out. But I think once people come back to the office, you're going to see productivity levels start to go back up again. And you have other naysayers like, well, no, I'm much more effective at home. I can get a lot more work done at home. I just don't think that's necessarily true for the majority of the people.

I think for some people it is, right? And some jobs it is, but it does take discipline. It does take a— you know, you've got to have the right work environment for that, right?

Yeah.

And like I said, you got a lot of kids running around, that's not going to be the right work environment. You have a lot of other distractions, you know, you mentioned the book and the TV and all that, that's not a good work environment. You've got to have a similar work environment like you have at the office.

We live effective in a world of distractions with cell phones. Yeah, I mean, we live in a world of it. So that's why it's hard for me to sit there and be like, yeah, I'm very effective at home, because no, everything's a distraction.

Yeah, well, I think that was the issue too with Zoom calls, right? Like, in this room there's no distractions. We're talking to each other, making eye contact. You're on Zoom, A, you can't make eye contact. B, guess what else is on your screen? Everything. The entire world's at your fingertips because you got the internet right there, right? And so staying engaged in the conversation in Zoom— oh, there's a notification. Oh, there's this, right? And we have kind of a rule in our meetings. There's no laptops. We've put our phones away so we can be engaged, right? Be here in the moment. And I think on Zoom, that was really difficult for people.

It's hard to enforce it on Zoom.

Impossible, right?

Obviously, you could do that on your lap or something where you can see it. You get back to this coming back to work too, and this great resignation that could be percolating out there. It'll be interesting to see how that manifests itself because I think maybe it's just my age, but I think that there's a bit of entitlement there, you know, where people think that, oh, you know, I get to do this because my peers do, my coworkers, you know, and that's where I have kind of an issue with that because I just, I guess I'm just against all entitlements, you know, in general.

Yeah.

You know, it's just a bad message to send.

Of course, we like to say you're part of a different generation too, right?

You know, yeah.

How do they say it now? Okay, boomer, right?

Yeah.

No.

Oh yeah, my grandkids always say that. Okay, boomer.

Uh, that sounds terrible, Steve.

You know, actually, I've gotten used to it. Oh man, we're like a badge of pride now.

That's right, I am a boomer. Own it. What have you done for this generation, right? So I think one thing that's come out of this though is even if they do resign, right, We have this big great resignation. One of the pillars that we talk about is intentional culture, right? And I think for the people that resign from the companies that you've built, right, if you've had that intentional culture and they still resign, that's actually a good thing, right? Like, that's a really good thing because it means they weren't totally bought into the mission. It means they totally weren't bought into the purpose, right? It gives you an opportunity though, and I think we have this coming out of COVID now, is there's been a lot of people who have reduced staff who said, hey, we didn't have to run with a full crew. Now, maybe as we're ramping back up, it's a great time to take a pause and say, do we need all these people, right? Which roles do we need to bring back on? Because maybe you had roles that you kept on out of more like loyalty than actual necessity. Maybe you had roles that this person wasn't really the right fit for. Now we have an opportunity to hire and rebuild our organization again, you know, kind of like a moment to hit reset, right? Like, I think there's an advantage to that. Yeah, you've been running lean. What are you going to do as you start rebuilding, right?

Yeah, and I think that those people that refuse to come back to the office probably aren't the people you want anyway because they're not about that teamwork and that collaboration.

Well, maybe they're not about the mission or the culture, right? Like, they don't care necessarily— core values or the mission don't really apply to them. Weren't really bought into it. You know, I know this is an episode we're going to talk about later, but, you know, this idea of buying into the culture of the company, the mission of the company, right? If you're at a fleet management company and you're there to keep the vehicles on the road and it's just not your thing, you're not into it, then the Great Resignation, man, this sounds actually kind of intriguing, right? But if you really care about your job and you really care about the work you're doing, this isn't even going to be an option for you. And so I think that's the idea behind this is you want people who are committed, you want people who are motivated. You don't motivate people, you hire motivated people.

Amen.

And so this idea that we want to make sure as you're resetting, don't just bring on a warm body because you got a warm body. I know it's really tempting to do that when you have a shortage of labor resources, but that's where that discipline comes back in.

right?

And that intentional culture. We bring on people that fit what we're trying to do, and we're not in a rush, right? We will limp along as long as it takes to find somebody that's going to do the job right.

Well, you're better off if you do that on the front end and have to deal with it on the back end, right?

So, all right, well, uh, that's going to do it for us today. Uh, again, make sure to, uh, share the Fleet Success Show with your friends, tag us on social media @fleetsuccess. And we will see you next week.

Hoorah!

Goodbye.

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