Best Fleets 2021: The Year in Review

With last week’s announcement by the TCA that they’re moving their convention from April to September, several Best Fleets-related activities also have to change. At this time of year, we’re normally preparing the final results book for printing and distribution, compiling fleet reports with feedback for the participants, and developing education sessions to share the findings. All of those are tied to the convention, so this year they’re on hold until September.

However, since the point of the Best Fleets program is collecting and sharing insights about industry trends and creative ideas, I thought I’d use this space to share what information I can, without spoiling anything for the fall.

This year’s edition of Best Fleets to Drive For was unlike any that came before. Aside from the obvious spectre of a pandemic hanging overhead, we also collected the information earlier in the year than normal (in preparation for what was then planned to be a January convention), and we had a record number of nominees and participants. Here’s how that broke down and some of the noteworthy things that fleets were doing.

This year we had 150 nominated fleets, easily beating our previous record of 140 from 2019. This was a real surprise - with the change in dates and the distraction of the pandemic, we fully expected the nominations to go down, but it seems that a lot of drivers were pretty happy with their fleets and showed that by nominating them. However, that didn’t carry over into the fleets themselves - the number of fleets participating in the evaluation process was 102, roughly in line with past years. The number of fleets completing all phases of the evaluation process and making it to the final scoring round also didn’t match the record nominations, sitting at 75 finalists. This was up from last year but short of the previous record of 80.

From those participating fleets, a total of 6917 driver surveys were collected. That’s also above last year’s count, but well shy of the record 8400 collected in 2019.

So, what did those surveys tell us? And what are the fleets doing that make them winners this year? Over the next couple of columns I’ll break down some of those details.

Improvements Across the Board

This year saw the continuation of improvements observed last year across a variety of driver-related metrics.

The average satisfaction score across the Top 20 was 91.82%, up from last year’s 91.44%, which itself was an improvement from the previous year’s 89.55%.

Along with those satisfaction numbers, we’re also seeing a steady improvement in driver retention. I’ve written before about the challenges of accurately calculating what should and shouldn’t be counted as turnover, and this year we continued refinining that process. Taking various factors into consideration, we produce a retention score for each fleet, with higher numbers being better. In 2019, the average retention score across the Top 20 was 7.16, last year it was 9.31, and this year it hit 9.41. That’s a 31% improvement in 2 years, so the Top 20 are definitely seeing positive results from their efforts in this area.

Similar improvements were seen in safety scores and compensation. Neither is that surprising in the context of the pandemic – fewer crashes when most of the population is parked at home for months, and more pay for drivers to compensate for the extra risks they’re taking on – but it will be interesting to see what happens next year as the world starts returning to normal.

Technology Takes Center Stage

We’ll be digging into pandemic response in more detail in a future article, but there were a number of spillover effects in other areas, beyond direct operational changes. One of those was adoption of technology to improve driver efficiency, and the process for evaluating and implementing that technology. 

For this, we’re looking not at hardware or software directly on the truck itself, but non-truck systems that help people do their jobs more effectively. We’ve always asked about this, and in recent years the answers have typically related to things like mobile apps, tablets, and email. Adoption of non-truck technology is one place where the trucking industry has typically lagged other sectors, but the pandemic pushed everyone to take a giant leap forward. 

The most notable example of this can be seen in the way companies conduct driver meetings. Over the past few years the industry in general has been moving slowly away from live, in-person meetings and finding new ways to get together. Unsurprisingly, that took a huge leap in the past year when trucking, like the rest of the corporate world, suddenly became experts in Zoom, WebEx, and GoToMeeting. Fully one third of this year’s finalists had a regular, multichannel meeting strategy that included both in-person (where possible) and virtual meetings, with interactive opportunities and recordings available for drivers. Nearly another third had occasional interactive online meetings.

While this seems like an obvious change in response to the pandemic, it still represents a significant leap forward for an industry that's relied on in-person meetings for years. Now that it’s standard practice across such a significant portion of the finalists, it’s expected that we’ll see this continue well after the crisis subsides, so we'll be watching to see if the remainder of the fleets (the third of participants who still weren't incorporating online tools into their meetings) move in this direction next year.

Another technology-related area that’s continuing to see steady improvement is the process for selecting and implementing new online tools. This is another area that I’ve written about before, and it’s continuing to mature. A few years ago, fleets considering new (non-truck) technology would rarely involve drivers in the process. It was generally management reviewing options in conjunction with vendor sales reps, perhaps with a limited pilot project, then making a decision amongst themselves.

Now, we’re seeing a much more mature buying process, with drivers regularly involved in defining the requirements, providing input on options, and assisting with the rollout. We’re also seeing fleets adopt more modern procurement best practices to review multiple options, and use pilot groups to field test those options before making a decision. The result is a better experience for drivers, fewer change management issues, and better ROI in a shorter timeframe.

Coming Up Next

Performance management has also seen dramatic improvements in technology support over the past few years. We’ve been measuring how fleets manage driver performance ever since the beginning of the program, but this year we expanded that to look at other roles as well. What we found, and how it relates to the driver experience, were fascinating. 

I’ll dig into that next time.