Interesting Perspective from Werner COO

This article was published in the latest version of "The Trucker".....its worth a read:

Derek Leathers is an imposing figure physically.

Standing at well over 6 feet tall, the president and COO of Werner Enterprises still looks as though he could strap on the pads and handle himself well on the football field, which is exactly what he did some 20-plus years ago at Princeton University where he earned a degree in economics and immediately launched his career in the trucking industry.

And in those 20-plus years since, he shunned a possible banking career because he wanted a job with more people contact than finance afforded, and he’s become an authoritative and respected voice in trucking.

He’s in demand all over the country as a lecturer and turns up on just about every panel discussion about driver issues.

So it was no surprise that he was one of four panelists on a discussion titled, “All About the Driver” at the recent American Trucking Associations Management Conference and Exhibition held here.

Here are some of the statements Leathers, 44, made as a response to questions posed to him and the other panelists during the 90-minute discussion.

• About 40 percent of the drivers Werner hires are right out of school and the company works hard during the first 90 days of employment to not only help further develop the skills of driving a truck, but to develop an understanding of the industry.

He calls it a finishing process, which at Werner could take anywhere from five to eight weeks and is a vital step because of the changing demographics and changing personalities of young hires.

“We give them a sort of a healthy introductory dose to trucking and I don’t mean the mechanical side or the driving side,” he said. “I mean an industry orientation into the lifestyle they are now entering because as we look at the turnover graphs it would be my contention it’s not so much large truckload carriers at 99 percent and midsize at 80, it’s really those that hire students at 99 percent and those that don’t at a lower number because within the large truckload fleets what you really see is the student turnover rate that’s well into the 100 percent and maybe as much as 200 percent within those first 90 days.”

There’s no silver bullet to making sure young drivers make it past the 90-day mark, he said.

“I think it’s commitment across our organization that you have to literally hold their hands at a significantly higher level than what you do for an experienced driver,” he said. “When I say experienced I mean six months of experience, not someone who’s been around five or 10 years, just somebody who’s been through the initial issues with the loading process at the customer level, or the global communication devices. Those things are very alarming to a new driver in the industry. They have enough to worry about with safety and just driving the truck appropriately that any little wrinkle added causes a great deal of duress.”

• Weekly miles, equipment, pay, benefits and home time are factors that play key roles in driver retention.

“We continuously examine and look at these and I think it’s a combined effort across the board,” he said. “In particular, I think we’ve put a stronger focus on getting drivers home more often, building jobs that allow them to get to the house at least once a week. The days when a driver would be out on the road for two or three weeks and then come home for three or four days, seem to be evaporating right before us. Pay is important. We all know we have a pay problem in the industry, but we also know we are not in a position financially to be able to afford wholesale pay increases until we get better support from the customers. Our focus on the pay side has been more on performance-based incentives (Werner has more than 300 pay packages). That’s what a lot of fleets are doing, building pay packages that incentivize drivers to be all that they can be and make sure that the best drivers’ pay goes up more based on their performance than one year on the calendar that happened to pass.”

• Pay by the hour for all of trucking is a long way off, if ever.

“It’s [pay by the hour] been a short consideration to be blunt,” Leathers said. “We look at all kinds of pay. We do have drivers in our fleet today that for dedicated reasons might be paid other than by the mile. Fundamentally it’s my perspective that we can’t disconnect on how we are paid by our customers and have our driver paid by some different format. The culture of the for-hire carrier unlike the private fleet with scheduled routes is that we are only as good as the person in the cab who is able to be a voice on their own behalf and ultimately on our behalf. In other words, if they are being delayed, if they are somehow impacted in a negative way, they are going to let us know because in that same way it’s alerting us that our truck is not moving and producing revenue and if we were to disconnect those two events and pay by the hour, you would lose the single biggest point of light you have in your fleet relative to the inefficacies, which is a driver raising his or her hand. I don’t want to lose that.”

• Signing bonuses are probably not the best idea for a carrier.

“As we see the industry get infatuated with signing bonuses and things of that nature, the difficulty in that approach is that we end up creating our own churn because they jump fleet to fleet to fleet and we all experience this 90-day phenomenon where you are trying to invocate them into your culture and they are in the cab of a truck halfway across America.”

• The federal government needs to stay out of the issue of driver pay.

“You are not going to see us lining up soon asking the government to get in our business,” Leathers said in response to a report that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has been reviewing an Australian study that shows a positive link between pay by the hour and safety. “I think it’s a misnomer that we don’t all wake up every day and work as hard as we can to focus on safety and it’s a bit demeaning for them to think somehow they are going to do it better than we do when it is our primary mission every day.”

But with that said, Leathers offered a perspective that’s not popular in all segments of the trucking community.

“If you really want to shine a light on what is going on out there it’s through electronic logging,” he said. “Until we know that everyone is operating on a level playing field, until we can visibly see we are all playing by the same rules, I think the experimentation we continue to have tinkering with Hours of Service, tinkering with pay methodology or tinkering with anything else, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s way too dark out there. Turn the lights on. Get us on electronic logging, get us on a standard format. Let’s prove as an industry that we are serious about compliance and that we are committed to making sure we obey the laws of the land as they are written before they get to write new ones.”

The industry can argue all it wants about electronic logging devices, but the longer total implementation gets delayed the more things may be thrown at the industry with which it disagrees, Leathers believes.

“It’s positive once you get it through the knothole, once our drivers are comfortable with it,” Leathers said of implementation of ELDs, “and I do think it’s a good thing that it illuminates on the dash with wasted minutes because with truck prices going where they are right now, we can’t afford to waste a single minute for a lot of reasons.”