• The key for many organizations is to get employees to actively participate in the activities of the company.
• As employee’s knowledge and skills improve, and when they’re able to influence the decisions that affect the quality of their work-life, they will begin to make greater investments back into the company — investments of loyalty and commitment.
• Successful driver involvement programs require genuine management commitment and involvement.

Among the most underutilized resources of any motor carrier are the talents, knowledge, and skills of its employees. Because of this, getting employees to actively participate in the activities of the company is a key objective for many organizations. This is especially important in the case of drivers. Drivers continue to show a strong desire to be more fully involved in the company. But accomplishing this involvement can be difficult given the nature of the typical driver/company relationship — characterized by infrequent and often unpredictable personal contact.

However, overcoming this obstacle is essential. In order to retain drivers, a company must develop and implement programs to get the drivers more actively involved and invested in the organization.

The primary idea behind increasing driver participation is that the tasks, activities, and requirements they perform everyday become more interesting and challenging. As their knowledge and skills improve, and when they’re able to influence the decisions that affect the quality of their work-life, they will begin to make greater investments back into the company — investments of loyalty and commitment. As this investment grows larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to walk away from.

Increasing driver involvement offers many advantages over traditional management practices and can be instrumental in the success of retention efforts. For instance, driver involvement:

• Replaces potential adversarial driver/management relationships with trust, cooperation, and mutual respect.
• Increases driver enthusiasm for safety values, goals, and policies, and commitment to the organization overall.
• Fosters creativity and innovation in problem solving among all employees, enabling each to more fully realize their potential.
• Empowers drivers to make daily decisions and solve problems immediately which in turn greatly enhances operational efficiency; and
• Increases overall driver job performance, safety, and satisfaction. Increasing driver involvement will take time and may be expensive. But the long-term return (reduced driver turnover) on this investment will pay back many times over. Taken as a whole, participative management approaches can be extremely beneficial in organizational decision-making and driver retention.

What should be considered when developing programs to increase driver involvement at a company? There are ten basic principles which serve as important guidelines for the establishment of employee involvement programs:

1. Successful driver involvement programs require genuine management commitment and involvement.
2. Drivers’ ideas, suggestions, and contributions must be given serious consideration and implemented whenever the recommendations are sound and relevant — doing so will add validity to any program.
3. The driver involvement program must have long-term continuity and focus on contributing to company operations. A frequent failing of many driver involvement programs is that they end up being a short-term activity — a flavor-of-the-month program — in which interest and value quickly fade after initial enthusiasm is gone.
4. Driver involvement programs must include everyone. Office employees are as important as drivers.
5. Organization of the programs should be kept simple and clear. A weakness of many employee involvement programs is over-organization, with a superstructure that soon collapses under its own weight. As with many things, simpler is usually better.
6. Successful involvement programs require careful initial preparation. While participants and leaders should be selected at the beginning of the program, the emphasis should subsequently be placed upon voluntary participation with a minimum of program forcing.
7. Involvement sessions are most effective when the participants share the same sense of purpose. Meetings that are considered to be a waste of time by several or all participants may have a negative impact. Train participants in problem identification, analysis, and solving.
8. The substance of involvement meetings, as well as the overall program, should be kept fresh, focused, and relevant to current company issues.
9. Some leadership of the employee involvement program should come from front-line operations — namely dispatchers, supervisors, and operations managers. This assures direct operational participation rather than only from staff management.
10. Employee involvement programs are an important part of, but not a substitute for, the company-wide quality transport safety policies and procedures.