Episode 009: Employee Retention

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Welcome back to the Fleet Success Show. This is episode number 9. Uh, today topic, we're going to talk a little bit about employee retention. I know I've been having a couple conversations this week about some of the challenges that we're facing in the industry, and this one just seems to keep coming up. Um, you know, I heard it directly from one of our clients. We heard it today from a couple of our clients on our client advisory board. So we're going to tackle this today. Again, with me, I've got Jeff Jenkins.

Hello.

And Steve Saltskiver.

Hi there.

I just realized I'm a little bit jealous of this. You guys is first and last initials are the same. I'm like the odd duck out here. Yeah, JJ and SS, JT. So, uh, funny random fact. Anyway, the, uh, things we got going on today— technician retention. This client I talked to talked about how they've got techs that are basically jumping ship for anything from $1 to $2 an hour in pay, right? Which, you look at the hourly rate for a technician and, you know, it's not that much more that they're getting, but it's enough that they say, yeah, I'm, you know, kind of chasing the money a little bit. Um, we've got a, you know, there's— we already know there's a bit of a technician shortage. We've got driver shortages. We have— there's an overall labor shortage that we've talked about, uh, kind of hitting the country right now. But how do you handle, you know, this kind of pandemic? This— I'm not gonna call it a pandemic because it's not a virus, but it's an epidemic. Of technician retention and staff retention, uh, just making sure that you keep the good people, you know, you've worked really hard to hire, keep them on the bus. So that's going to be our topic today. Um, I think one of the key things that we— that I always like to look at, you know, people think, wow, you know, $1 to $2 an hour. And Jeff, I know you got some opinions on this, I can't wait to hear them. Yeah, but, uh, you know, like $1 to $2 an hour the cost of losing an employee, you know, you might have to go back and look at it, but it might be worth that $1 to $2 an hour. And so you might be, because you're holding off on paying a little bit extra— not saying bust out the bank and do a $5 per hour raise or anything like that, but for a dollar more, if that means you keep an employee, you know, over the course of that year, uh, you know, you figure a full-time employee is $2,000 or 2,000 hours a year. An extra dollar an hour, it cost you $2,000. The cost to go hire, train, find a replacement, um, you know, I know for the common metric I see thrown around is anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000, somewhere like maybe about 10% of their salary. Um, well, that way outweighs a dollar an hour raise, right, if it's an extra $2,000.

So, and that's the metric we used. When I was managing, is it was around $13,000 to $17,000.

The cost to go find a replacement.

To go find a replacement. I mean, you got to get them on board. You got to train them.

Loss of productivity.

Recruit. You lose productivity. I mean, it's a lot when you lose a person.

And obviously, one of the sides of this too, you've got supply and demand, right? That's definitely playing a role in this. We do have to be careful that we're not escalating and just endlessly escalating, you know, but going out and looking what are the fair market rates in your area and are you competitive, right? You know, you don't want to necessarily overpay, but at the same time you don't want to be so cheap that you're losing people over, over a dollar, right? And kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Yes, and there's a lot of other things that go in this besides pay. I know we're talking about pay right now, right? Specifically But here's my perspective when it comes to pay. One, there should be annual pay reviews to make sure that you're staying competitive. Yes. When it comes to you, to what you're hiring into, in additional what you're paying your current people, just to make sure you're in line for what that cost is. But me, whether I'm a technician or anybody, anybody else, right? If I'm gonna go look and try and find another job, it's typically not because of pay. There's other underlining reasons.

Right.

But if you come to me and I say— well, actually, if I go find a new job and I come to you and say, hey, I'm quitting, and I tell you the reason is pay, and I say, Josh, you know what, I'm quitting. I just found this job. You're paying me $18 an hour. They're going to pay me $20 an hour. And you say, well, what if I match it? You know my answer to you is screw you. You know why that's my answer? Is because why wasn't I worth $20 before I decided to quit, right?

And that's why you've got to do this proactively.

That's why you've got to do the annual pay reviews to make sure that you're paying people. If I wasn't good enough for $20 an hour before I decided to quit, why am I good enough now? In my mind, that's more of an insult than anything else. Well, what if I match it?

Yeah, and this is one of— like, I don't match pay. Like, if people come to me and say, hey, I'm leaving, I got this great job offer, you know, like, I kind of say, hey, that's awesome, right? I have a saying, you guys have heard me say this before, but once somebody's soul's left the building, their body should follow, right? And if they've gotten to the point that they're ready to go look for another job, they should go with them, right? Like, their body should go where their mind is at. Um, and so, you know, even if it's only a dollar or two I will not react by doing a counteroffer. One of the things to know about money, we talk about things that are satisfiers in life and things that are dissatisfiers. If you don't have enough money, that's a dissatisfier. But at some point you have enough money, having more money won't make you more satisfied, right? Like, it doesn't remove— all it does is remove dissatisfaction, but it doesn't give you satisfaction, right?

It's—

there's a lot of science behind this, and I'm trying to remember some of the authors that I want to throw out at you. We'll throw the links in the comments once I get my brain back on track. But the idea is that at some point, it's kind of like water. You ever been really thirsty and dehydrated, right? You can drink water when you're really dehydrated and it feels so good, right? Like, you're just like, oh, that was a great bottle of water. And then somebody hands you another bottle of water, you're like, all right, well, I can do a second one. Somebody hands you a third bottle of water, at some point you're satisfied. Like, more water isn't going to make you less thirsty, right? Like, you're, you're done, you're capped. And money kind of ends up being the same way. More money just means that you end up spending more, right? We've seen that kind of in the past too. But it's this idea that it's really just a dissatisfier. Yeah, you want to be making more, but there's other things, and you've alluded to this a little bit, there's other things that are probably more important than pay. Just make sure that the pay isn't, that it's in line with where it should be. You should be doing that regularly.

It goes back to that. I remember when we were at that Elite Conference, I was talking to a member of the company she was with was total rewards, which really gets down to quantifying each position. What is the real dollar value of benefits, lower copays for insurance, all those things that may filter into that. You almost have to be proactive and preempt all this.

Communicate.

So when someone even entertains the idea of jumping ship, they know what they're gonna lose.

It was interesting. I was talking to somebody that works for Microsoft. Microsoft does this, right? And they actually, they don't just tell you what your base salary is. You know, let's say you're making six figures, you're $100,000 a year salary. And, you know, like that's the number we float around with in our head is, well, that's our worth, right? Like we're worth $100,000. I can go jump ship and go get this other job and maybe they pay me $110,000, right? Well, if you just look at the salary number, it might not be enough. And Microsoft figured this out really quickly. And so what they do is they actually give you a total comp pay packet, essentially, and it tells you everything that goes into your compensation. So if you do go find and look for another job, you're doing it competitively. And they roll everything because they pay for full benefits. They do all these extra perks and all these, you know, like they've got a lot of golden handcuffs and soft, you know, fleece handcuffs if you want to call them that. But this idea that you really need to understand all of the cost that goes into you as an employee and all the things that we pay for so that when you go jump ship, you're getting paid fairly because—

I remember as a fleet manager leaving the state of Utah and going to Georgia. Uh-huh. I looked at what the cost of living was there and what the—

That's a huge factor.

It's huge. You can get either a decrease in pay or an increase in pay just by moving from one state to another.

Yeah.

You know, people need to look at all those factors.

Dan Price up in Seattle, right? He's kind of famous 'cause he was the $70,000 minimum wage guy.

Right?

And, you know, I'm looking at that like, $70,000, like, that's really significant. Well, it's because I'm thinking in Phoenix dollars, right? Yeah, the equivalent here is $52,000, right? So up there in Seattle, because things are so much more expensive, well, $70 grand doesn't go as far as it would down here. And so, like, there's an equivalency factor there, which I thought was really interesting. Um, so what else? You know, let's just— let's say you're paying competitively You know, your guys aren't leaving for $1 or $2 an hour. If that's the case, bump it up $1 or $2. You're going to save yourself a ton of turnover, right? But I really don't think that's the case, right? So I think the first step you kind of need to do is some exit interviews. Get to the real reality. Why is it that you left? Because it wasn't for the money. Like, what else is going on? And I think what you'll find is a lot of times it comes back to the culture, belonging, right? Like, am I doing something that matters? Do I feel appreciated? Pay is usually just a symptom of a bigger problem.

It goes back to that statement, you know, people don't leave companies, they leave bosses.

Yeah, they leave managers.

They leave managers. So I mean, that could be your underlying problem in your company, why people are leaving. You know, it gets back to that intentional culture we talk about.

Yeah.

How are you training your managers? How are your managers reacting to those they, you know, that they supervise. Could be simple things, could be lack of communication, could be, you know, a weird look on their face, you know, right? People react emotionally to different stimuli.

So, well, and it's a people business, and I think that where we lose sight a lot of times as leaders, as you get so busy that you don't take the time to get to know the person and what drives that person, and that's where you end up losing those people is because they don't feel appreciated. Most people would stick around if they felt more appreciation, even if they can go somewhere and make an extra dollar an hour, whatever it is, right? They just want to feel appreciated. And, you know, I haven't always thought this way, um, and my thinking has come around, you know, as I've, as I've matured and gotten older, because I used to be that same, and I would just call it a boss because I wasn't a leader that was just trying to punch everybody and try and milk them for all you could, right? I just want to maximize the productivity while they're here. And that's kind of how I, like, I grew up in trucking. Like, we, when I first started, the average turnover of like a dispatcher was about a year, year and a half. And it's because overwork you, underpay you, you never feel appreciated, you feel like you're always, you know, stressed out, under the gun to maximize and produce as much as you possibly can. And they didn't seem to care because they could go next year and they can hire new college grads to be dispatchers. They can pay them that same $35,000 a year and train them, right? And you're going to lose a little bit in that productivity and that training, but they train them and then they figure they'll stick around for another year or so, and then they do the whole cycle all over again. So you're just churning these people, and it's no different when it comes to other industries, but that's just how some people think about it, right? Is you're just like, hey, I'll train them for a few months and then I'll get all I can out of them, and then I'll do the same thing all over again.

Yeah, you know, that works good though if you've got a supply, but if you don't have a supply, like you're missing drivers or technicians, and that's the problem, that becomes an issue.

You're absolutely right. Yeah, that's the problem now. No one wants to actually work, and especially work with their hands, manual labor. And that I would consider technicians manual labor, but manual labor is in such high demand and people don't want to do that. They want to sit around and they want to look at their video games or their computer screen or do whatever. And people just don't want to get those skills, which is just shocking to me.

That whole shift to STEM.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what are some of the things then, you know, you kind of talked about this a little bit. Patrick Lencioni's got this great book. It's— he started off, the title used to be called Three Signs of a Miserable Job, but they realized that it wasn't really like the best book to have on your table when your boss walked by. So they rechanged the title to The Truth About Employee Engagement. Right. And he kind of boiled it down. A really nice little story about a restaurant out in in the Tahoe area, but kind of boiled this down to there's 3 things that really impact an employee and whether or not they're bought in, right? And if they feel like they belong at your company. The first one's anonymity, right? Are they anonymous or do you know them as a manager, right? And this is kind of where you talked about, are they a cog in a machine or are they an actual person with a story? And do they feel like, okay, if I'm not here, I'd be missed.

Right.

The second one is irrelevance. Is my— does my work matter? Right. Does it matter to somebody else? You know, maybe it's not a— and this is why the stakeholder satisfaction is so critical to get right, to understand who their stakeholders are.

Right.

And maybe they're not impacting your end customer, but they could be impacting their fellow technicians. They could be impacting the shop supervisor, that driver that day. Right. And having them go through that stakeholder satisfaction exercise and understanding the relevance, why their job's important. And then the last one's a measurement. Do they even know how to tell if they had a good job, like if they've done a good job or not? You get to the end of the day and you go home, ask yourself that question. How do I know if I've done a good job? And you've got to have a way to measure and evaluate yourself on, did I do a good day's worth of work today?

I always read when you talk about that, I always go back to The Eighth Habit written by Covey and where he talks about a soccer team, you know, like 7 out of the 11 people on the team don't even know which goal to kick it in because management's not communicating, you know, what success means inside that company.

That's so sacrilegious.

Yeah, but, you know, but you think about that. I mean, you as a manager, you've got to articulate that vision. You've got to be able to get people rowing in the same direction or you're sunk from the beginning. As far as retention, one of the things that I've always found is a lot of us, if you're in the line, you're blaming HR. You can't get me enough people, right? I think one of the things we have to recognize is retention and team building and hiring, recruiting, that's a business problem. That's not just a, you know, a problem for the fleet. That's not just a problem for drivers. You got to work together and make that a unified problem for the company or the organization.

Yeah.

You know what the one thing that you can do to help with this problem when it comes to retention? And that's an actual well-thought-out one-on-one with each individual person, which a lot of people don't do it.

They skip it.

They don't do it at all. Not worth my time. Yeah, not worth my time. But getting not only just getting to know somebody, but also understanding how they feel they're doing at their job, checking in on their goals, making sure that you're aligned in what those are, and then also talking to them about the future. Hey, what do you want out of life? What do you want out of this job? Where do you want to go? And then helping them with a plan to get that there. That'll be more fruitful for retention than most anything else.

And it's the biggest thing it costs you. Is a little bit of time, right? If you've got, you know, 5 direct reports, right? You shouldn't have a ton of direct reports, maybe 5 to 8 ideally. You might have 10 or 12, but the idea is that you should meet with your direct reports at least weekly or biweekly, right? That's something we do here.

Yes.

Regular one-on-one cadence is a huge part about employee buy-in and getting rid of, as Patrick Lencioni called it, anonymity. Getting rid of the cloud of, you know, if I didn't show up tomorrow, nobody would even care, right?

And also probably animosity, right?

Because it leads back, right?

Yeah, because if you don't—

he's gonna care about me, right?

They won't even talk to me.

So the biggest thing you're giving there is just your time, right? And that time is a currency that, like, that spends really well with your people.

Well, it does, and you've got to make it beneficial to both parties. If you've got someone that's struggling in their job, you should know it because in those one-on-ones you're talking about that and you're putting a plan together on how you're going to be able to correct that behavior or what needs to change. And so you're not going to get to the point to where like, oh my God, I got to get rid of this person, you know, because I just noticed X. Well, you're talking every week or you're talking biweekly and you're helping to develop that person. It's, you know, it's one of those things that taking that time, that 30 minutes every week or 30 minutes every other week to to train and to develop and to help somebody get better at their job, who does that benefit but me as a leader? Right.

There's such a huge investment in the company, right? Because you're investing in them, you're investing in the company. They feel more engaged and they're going to improve, right? And they know that you care about them and like you, they know you're watching and they know that you pay attention. And hey, I'm going to try a little bit harder because, you know, Jeff knows my kids' names. He knows what matters to me. He knows what my dreams are. He knows what I'm trying to go and do. And because he cares about me, right? Isn't there a saying like that? People won't care until they know how much you care.

Yeah.

Right? And that's exactly what it is, you know, and now all of a sudden they start caring more about the job. They start performing better and now they're higher productivity. They're doing more with less and they're gonna stick around, which means you don't have to retrain their replacement, right?

Yes. If you were to go, and I just want to— we're just gonna guess here real fast, but if we were to go to a typical fleet manager or to someone who manages technicians outside of an annual review, how many one-on-ones do you think are actually happening? I'm just talking technician-specific.

Industry-wide, it'd be very few, right? A little less than 10% industry-wide. I think there's the exceptional fleets are probably doing it, right? But I think that's few and far between because it's, it's a time thing, right? And we said it before in the last podcast, you don't have a time problem, you have a priority problem. Right, right. And what you're doing when you do a one-on-one is you're making them a priority.

Yes. So here's the challenge: if you're listening and you are in charge of technicians, start one-on-ones and just start it on a bi-weekly, uh, cadence and just do it every other week and see how that changes and if your turnover improves.

So a good— sorry, Steve, you say it doesn't have to be long either?

No, half an hour, 15 minutes.

Right? Some of the common things, you know, that I like to include in the one-on-one, you know, if you're like, well, I don't even know what I would talk about. Well, just talk about them, right? Ask them how things are going at home. You know, what's going on in their life. Start there and just see where the conversation goes. If you need a second talking point, you know, at RTA, we usually talk about, we call them Big Three. It's your goals, right? Your OKRs that you're working on that trimester. How are you doing on your progress? What's your professional development look like? How you been personally growing in the last 2 weeks, right? And you're kind of there as an accountability partner too, helping them grow and helping them mature. And then what's your career growth look like? You know, are you working on anything? Where do you want to go in your career plan, right? We usually will hit those first 2 religiously, and then the second 2 we make sure we sprinkle in kind of throughout the trimester because they usually don't change too often.

But you know, when it comes to a technician too, a lot of people are guilty of not providing enough training.

Yeah.

You know, and so they don't feel like they're important. I mean, that's obviously, it's an investment to their career.

Yeah.

You know, and training's not overly expensive. There's cheap avenues out there to train people. Right. You know, and every employee should have, you know, 40 hours a year training, taking them outta the workplace.

And help them sharpen, we talked about this last week, sharpening the axe, right? I guess 2 weeks ago. One of the key things with that is understanding where they want to go, right? It's one thing to say, hey, the company wants you to take this training. It's another to say, what training do you want? Like, where do you want to go in your career? Do you want to become a fleet manager? Do you want to be a shop supervisor? Do you want to be, you know, a driver dispatcher? Like, where do you want to go? Well, I don't even want to be a driver. I'm just doing this job while I'm going through school. Oh, well, where are you going for school? Oh, I want to be a lawyer. Well, man, that would be a great thing to know if you're their boss. How can I help you get that dream, right? Because you know what they're going to say about your company and your leadership when they leave? You know, like, that's a recruitment tool too, right? That's how you build intentional culture is through your people. Uh, other things. One of the things I think is key: onboarding, right? Start on the right foot. It's such an easy thing. People forget it, you know, like just start on the right foot, bring them in, talk about the culture, make sure they know who their boss is, make sure they know who their peers are, right? Take them on a tour of the building. One of the things that we're implementing here is an onboarding checklist. You know, make sure that everybody gets the same onboarding experience. It would really suck if you had somebody come in and you did a really great job with onboarding and, you know, they stayed. And then the next guy comes in and you, "I just don't have time to do it. Everything's just a mess right now. Sorry." And they don't get the same experience that everybody else gets, right? And so we talk about intentional culture. Intentionally onboard is one of those things.

One of the strangest onboardings I had is I was to spend 60 days learning about the business and not making one single decision. And for a manager, you know, going into the business, you always want to make an immediate impact, right? Because that's sort of where your value's tied to. But they basically said, nope, I don't want you to do that. I want you to learn who all your peers are. I want you to read all this material and learn what our business does. I want you to, you know, and it was, it was kind of different. I'd never been through that before, but after doing it, I thought, you know, that's actually kind of nice. Yeah, because I mean, if you think about sometimes you butt heads because you're trying to change things that, that look dumb to you, but because you don't know any of the background to it. And this allowed you to ask those questions in advance and learn a lot about the culture.

Yeah.

And the company.

I think I've only had one job where they actually had an official onboarding where they had like a meeting or you had to spend some time somewhere when you started and that's it.

Outside of that, there hasn't been anything really official taking place, and a lot of it's just, "Hey, go sit with this person." Go sit with HR for a little bit, do some paperwork, sign your life away kind of a thing, and then here's your desk, right? I, you know, and I've been a part of them where I remember working at OfficeMax, like, "Okay, now you gotta go sit in the break room and watch these training videos." That was the worst. Those are so boring, right? Come on, guys, we can do better than this.

I'm gonna pull out my cell phone.

You want to engage your employees, right? Like, have that be, uh, you know, like a live in-person training, you know, bring a group of them together all at once if you want to do that. Uh, but make sure they feel like they're cared and they're not just shoved and sequestered. And you know what, I don't have time to do this, watch these videos, right? Or go sign these paper here, meet with HR, and then come see me when you're done, and then we're not gonna talk about it the rest of the day, right?

That's truck driver orientation 101 right there.

Great.

Send them all in a dark room after lunch watching video so they can take a nap, right?

Oh man. So I'd say one of the things I like doing is I started this with my leadership team and we're going to expand this out to the rest of the company. But whenever I'd hire a new leader, I'd always give them a welcome bag. I'd give them some swag, like an RTA jacket or t-shirt. And then I would give them books, right? Like, hey, here's the leadership books. Now, Jeff, I gave you your books before you even got hired, right? It was kind of a—

You kind of gave me in stages. You gave me 4 books before I got hired and then like 76 books waiting for me.

That's pretty much it.

Sorry.

And that might be something I do too, is, you know, I'm going to start screening, like, here's a $20 book, or, you know, read this book. Are you a culture fit? Because if you're not, you know, that's $20 well spent in my book. You know, but I give them things like to help re-instill, hey, these are the values, these are the things that we care about, right? And reinforce, like, we're excited to have you here on this team, right? Help them feel like they're not anonymous. You know, they know who we are. They're not irrelevant. I'll take them out. We did this with Joe when he first started.

Yep.

We took him up to one of the counties here locally, right? It was about an hour and a half drive to the county shop, but I wanted him to see this is where our people work, right? This is what they look like. This is how it works. This is where we operate, right? Get some empathy for the client. This is why your job matters, right? You think his job feels irrelevant? No, right? He knows what a difference he's making because he knows the people he's making a difference for. Do that, right? Like get them out of their work environment and show them their stakeholders. And then you have to be really clear. Here's the vision and here's how we're going to measure your role. Here's how you know if you're killing it, right? Here's how you know if you're getting out of the cave, killing something, dragging it back, right? That's how you know if you're winning, if you're successful. But you got to get really clear about with them on that so that they can go out and know at the end of the day when they go home, you know, when I crack open that beer, did I do a good job today?

That's one of the things. I mean, you have to have a clear strategic plan or some kind of a roadmap in your company that everybody can relate to and know what part of that roadmap is their responsibility and their ownership. Yeah. Otherwise they're just coming to work and performing a job until they get bored, right?

Yeah.

So, I mean, that's something that you need to do. When I was in state government and city government, they didn't have— we didn't have a lot of strategic plans. You know, I think what I was probably a rare individual as a manager that created one. Every year, you know, whether it was just to do better than we did the previous year with metrics or, you know, you have to have a goal. You got to have a purpose.

There's something you're working towards. Yeah. Well, guys, I think it was an awesome episode. I had fun doing this. Anything else you guys want to add?

I don't think I said a swear word yet. So do you want me to just throw one out here just for everything?

Just for good sake.

Shit.

There it is.

All right.

Well, until next week, thank you guys very much for tuning in. As always, let everybody know about the Fleet Success Show. Tag us on social media. @fleetsuccess. Share it with your boss, share it with your peers, get your techs on, start to have them listen to it, and we will see you next week.

Yippee-ki-yay!

Have a good one.

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