.gif)
Show Your Drivers You Care! Put a Healthy Trucking Kiosk in Your Terminal
“There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive.”
– B. C. Forbes (1880-1954), editor and founder of Forbes Magazine (1917)
What About Your Drivers’ Health?
By Dan Baker
 |
I work with a lot of trucking companies as a speaker, facilitator and consultant, and consequently I get to know them pretty well. The people who live and work in the trucking business are some of the greatest folks in the world.
Many times, as I work with a trucking company, I am reminded of the old statement I learned in the Methodist Ministry many years ago: “It’s the stuff you don’t see about yourself that bites you in the rear end.” In our busy world of too much to do and not enough time to do it in, we have time only for the most basic, obvious metrics for determining our overall company’s health. We look at our revenue, our costs, our cash and our accounts, and then we figure our operating ratio. We keep our eyes on our equipment, our fuel, our driver turnover and our customer situation, and if there are no new fires burning in the operations department, we go to lunch.
When times are tough, like they are today, we all have so much on our plate that when someone like me comes along and tells you that one metric you should be paying attention to is the physical health of your drivers, you have every right to just run me off. That is, until one of your drivers has a coronary doing 65 mph going south on IH 35 West at 4:30 p.m. four miles north of Fort Worth, Texas.
Sooner or later, following this tragic event, when you realize that the only fatalities were your driver and one elderly gentleman, you will see that it could have put you out of business. It is then that a lot of my clients will get interested in just how healthy their drivers are out there on the road.
Driving a truck is a sedentary business. Your driver spends hours running down the road thinking about the last thing whomever he was talking to said to him, living on fast food and truck stop gossip. He’s sleeping in a truck, showering in a truck stop, trying to maintain a long-distance marriage and raising kids 500 miles from the house. He spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself and being homesick. His lifestyle is a tough one, demanding all kinds of discipline and skill. But when it comes to his or her health, your drivers are seldom interested.
I think that motivating, educating and working with your drivers on their physical health is a tough sell. They know they should eat low-fat, high-fiber foods. They know they need to lay off too much sugar and caffeine. They all know they need to exercise in one way or another. But it’s a tough job to get them seriously thinking about it.
It reminds me of the TQM process we had going several years back. Everybody was talking quality this and quality that, but after all the seminars and lectures, everybody went back to doing things like they always had. But a few companies just kept on preaching it, teaching it, pounding it into their people, and after many repetitions, reinforcements and redundancies, it began to take hold. Today, those companies that went to the trouble to pound it in and make it stick are the leaders in quality service and quality performance.
I think it’s the same with this driver health thing. You’ve simply got to make it a priority and go after it. Preach it, teach it, sell it, yell it and keep bringing it up until you see results. Some companies have done a great job building health consciousness in their fleets. They provide their drivers with all sorts of health-oriented programs, including free diagnostic tests, exercise equipment and blood pressure kiosks in the drivers’ lounge, diet plans, driver health family picnics, etc.
The other one liner that I remember is the one that says that until you see what you’re doing wrong, you’ll keep on doing it. And on this subject of driver health, I would change it to say, “Until you see what you’re not doing, you’ll keep on not doing it.” Don’t wait for one of your rigs to kill someone before you wake up to the scary reality that we have a lot of drivers out there who are in terrible physical condition. If you love them, you’ll shove them toward better health.
Go after it, and good luck.
Dan Baker (www.danbakertexas.com; 1-830-438-3288) is a speaker and consultant to the trucking industry.
