During the first five years of his marriage, Rob Hatchett and his wife attended an annual marriage retreat where they received assignments to have conversations about a given topic, like money.
The same principle goes for driver pay, said Hatchett, president of Fleet Intel, a tool that helps carriers analyze and compare driver pay, benefits and other offerings.
In a TCA webinar titled “Is Raising Pay the Way to Boost Recruiting,” Hatchett’s top takeaway for carriers is to have regular conversations about driver pay packages, but more frequently than his annual marriage retreat. Hatchett, who has worked in driver recruiting for almost a decade, recommends carriers have a sit-down meeting among departments at least every six months to review market conditions, retention rates and other factors that contribute to driver pay rates.
“I like to treat driver pay like going to the dentist. There are a lot of things in life that we're told we need to have: a six-month checkup, the dentist being one of those … After we do that two or three times, we start thinking, ‘Why am I even going to the dentist. Every time I go it's good, and they're not finding anything.’ It's very easy to stop going to the dentist,” he said. "I personally had that happen two weeks ago. I hadn't been in two years … and I had a cap fall off. When you don't do regular checkups, you're just waiting for something bad to happen.
“I would encourage any carrier out there to put a calendar invite on the calendar for anybody involved every six months … It gives us a chance and a healthy environment to go, ‘We may need to make some tweaks,’ because if we don't have these checkups, we're just waiting for somebody to get upset, or we're waiting for us to get behind, and all of a sudden we're behind the market, and we hadn't even talked about it in two years.”
There are multiple areas he suggests spending time discussing – not just pay alone but the whole picture from benefits and home time to predictability, labor (loading, tarping, etc.) and work/life balance. And all of this culminates in a single question: do drivers value the job the carrier is offering?
“You have to consider the whole package because pay may get them through the door but may not be enough to keep them,” Hatchett said.
