When Driver Turnover Isn’t Really Driver Turnover

We’ve just completed the scoring process for this year’s Best Fleets to Drive For program (results to be announced January 30!) and once again the challenge of measuring a fleet’s driver turnover has come up. In determining the Top 20, we look at how effectively the company retains its workforce – generally seen as a measure of good corporate culture, and a positive outcome of the company’s efforts to make life better for drivers. An important consideration, but an area that’s always tricky so we’re constantly reviewing and tweaking our formulas for calculating it.

That probably sounds strange, since in theory it should be pretty simple to calculate turnover. You look at how many drivers a fleet has over a particular period and how many left during that same period, then figure out a ratio or percentage reflecting those numbers. There’s a standard formula used in the HR world that combines those numbers to create a retention score, but we learned long ago that basic formulas don’t work for us because they don't control for the various influencing factors that we need to consider.

No, it turns out that calculating turnover is actually much more complicated than I ever imagined it would be. 

Let’s look at why it’s complicated, and what we find as we dig into it.

What Is Turnover?

To begin with, what really counts as driver turnover? If older drivers retire, does that count? What about drivers who get injured and never return from medical leave? Other medical disqualifications? What about people who are fired for performance reasons? All of those are exits but not necessarily indicative of a bad culture. 

In some industries, those specific situations are rare so you don’t need to worry about it. In trucking, though, they’re much more common. Truck drivers tend to be older, and often not that healthy, so retirements and medical issues can be significant contributors to turnover - one of this year’s fleets saw retirements represent 81% of its exits. All those exits need to be considered.

Even if you just look at people who quit and go to another job elsewhere, it can still be complicated. When asked why drivers are quitting, the most common reason we hear is that they’re going to a local job. That seems like someone who’s essentially leaving the industry (or at least leaving the regional / OTR segments of it) but it’s also a convenient answer that likely isn’t true all the time – if a driver gives that as a reason then the company is less likely to challenge it or try and convince them to stay. You can’t always trust that it's true.

Now, if drivers are quitting and going to other similar fleets, that seems like the kind of turnover that we’re looking for, and something that may indicate culture issues. Still not black and white, though. It’s pretty common for at least some of those drivers to return to the company within a year – across all Best Fleets finalists this year, 28.44% of voluntary exits returned within the year.

Okay, so let’s ignore those and just count the “net voluntary exits”. That should give us a reliable number that we can use to determine turnover, right? We’re getting closer, but it’s still insufficient. It turns out that even looking purely at the percentage of drivers who voluntarily leave and don’t return, we still don’t always get a clear picture of what’s happening.

Most notably, those numbers get skewed by the presence of a new entrant program. Fleets that have substantial programs to bring new drivers into the industry generally have much higher turnover than fleets who don’t. They’re doing the tough work of weeding out the many people who think they want to be truck drivers but discover the hard way that they really don’t. Their turnover is higher but it doesn’t really indicate a bad culture. Similarly, fleets where drivers stay out for extended periods often have more turnover just because of the nature of the work. Not necessarily a bad culture either.

What Does That Turnover Indicate?

It’s also important to recognize that if someone quits, the problem may be the hiring process and not the company culture. If the company hires the wrong person for the job, and they quit because they’re unhappy, that doesn’t mean there’s a bad culture. There are problems in recruiting that need to be fixed, but when the right people get hired they might be perfectly happy.

But wait, there’s more!

Over the past couple of years there’s been a lot of merger and acquisition activity in the industry. Anytime a company gets a new owner, there are going to be employees unhappy about it who quit. In several cases, fleets have acquired other fleets and discovered that drivers at the acquired company don’t really want to follow the rules at the new company. There are, unfortunately, drivers on the road who don’t want to be safe and compliant, and they often end up working at companies who are happy to look the other way. When those companies get acquired and the new owner insists people run safe and compliant, those drivers leave. That’s not always what happens in an acquisition, of course, but in the Best Fleets program we’ve certainly seen examples of excellent companies acquiring smaller ones and having the drivers quit or get fired for safety reasons. That’s definitely not a case of a bad culture, in fact it’s more the opposite – a great culture that doesn’t have room for poor performers and bad attitudes.

In 2019, with the economy squeezing people significantly, we also saw fleets shrinking their driver counts. Sometimes they lost a major customer, sometimes they saw reduced business across multiple customers, but either way they didn’t have work for everyone and some drivers got cut. Also not indicative of a bad culture, but it can look like turnover.

To get a real picture of driver turnover in a fleet, and what that turnover is saying about the culture, we have to factor in all those elements and create a scoring process that controls for them. I can’t divulge the specifics of the formula that we use for the process, but it does get longer and more complicated every year!

The larger question, of course, is what to do about that turnover.

In the next article, I’ll look how the Best Fleets break out the different types of turnover, and what we’re seeing people do to tackle that problem for each of those types.