Hire Truckers Podcast

00:00 - 00:22
Brian Fielkow: You got to be so careful that safety is not a sign on the wall. The best thing a leader can do is embody it, make sure that safety is a non negotiable core value. We can never, as a leader, say, Hurry up, take every shortcut, just get it done, I don't care, to make the customer happy. Because ultimately, your employees conduct themselves in the environment that you create.

00:38 - 01:03
Aaron Craddock: Welcome to the Hire Truckers Podcast. I'm your host, Aaron Craddock, and super excited to have Brian Philco on today. And so the topic today is safety. And it just with recent legislation and rulings that you may know about in the industry today, like it's just more important than ever that we establish a culture of safety. And so Brian, thank you for joining the show today.

01:03 - 01:04
Aaron Craddock: Excited to dive in.

01:04 - 01:08
Brian Fielkow: Well, Erin, it's great to be with you, and I look forward to a really good conversation. Thank you.

01:09 - 01:15
Aaron Craddock: So we're going to dive right in. So why does safety create a competitive advantage in a fleet?

01:17 - 01:41
Brian Fielkow: Well, for a lot of reasons. And you already alluded to it with the litigation environment, with the recent Supreme Court, the Montgomery ruling. Safety has gone from how a lot people might perceive to be a compliance function or a checkbox function to understanding that safety is not a department. Safety is a way of life. Safety is the business.

01:42 - 02:05
Brian Fielkow: You see, at the foundation of all operationally excellent businesses is safety. Can you imagine a company running well operationally, consistently, if it's continually having safety problems? It's almost impossible. Safety is a competitive advantage for a lot of reasons. First of all, you know, it has a lot to do with your insurance cost.

02:05 - 02:25
Brian Fielkow: Insurance costs are across a fairly big gamut, right? There's a big range. And a lot of what determines that range is your performance. So it's a cost driver. These days, the safer you are and the more you invest in safety, time, and effort, the more it helps your reputation.

02:26 - 02:49
Brian Fielkow: And in this world, with the amount of underwriting and due diligence that's done on carriers, your reputation means everything. It's your ticket to competing for and winning the best accounts. It has a lot to do with employee morale. Most employees want to know that their employer cares about safety, because what does that mean? It means we're putting you first.

02:49 - 03:11
Brian Fielkow: We want to get you home in one piece, safely, above everything else. So it sends a powerful message to your employees. It sends a powerful message to your customers, and it ultimately drives your bottom line. Just a quick story. This is a little old, but I guess I'm learning age is okay.

03:12 - 03:31
Brian Fielkow: Paul O'Neill, he was George Bush's treasury secretary. Before then, was the CEO of Alcoa. And when he walked into Alcoa, it wasn't doing so well. And he told Wall Street, the investment community, that, Hey, if you want to know how we're doing, look at our safety numbers. And people ran for the door.

03:31 - 03:52
Brian Fielkow: They were like, This guy's crazy. I want to know about inventory and turns and margins. But he understood exactly what I said before, that if they run safely, that's a hallmark of the fact that they're running efficiently and productively and profitably. Stock went up seven times over under his thirteen year tenure. He proved it.

03:52 - 03:55
Brian Fielkow: He's still the standard bearer, and we can all learn from that.

03:56 - 04:15
Aaron Craddock: Yeah. And just we're seeing, like, the tides have turned. Just the value of to compliant fleets that have already been doing the right thing and focusing on safety culture is just exponentially increasing. I love those points. So what def yeah, go ahead.

04:15 - 04:47
Brian Fielkow: I mean, let's not use the word necessarily compliant, because I'll argue that just because you're compliant doesn't mean you're safe. Certainly, you have to comply with the regulations. It's important. But we've got to make sure that there's no misunderstanding that just because you're compliant doesn't mean you're operating safely. The example I'll give you is, what, twelve, thirteen years ago, there was a horrific accident where a truck ran into a limousine that had Tracy Morgan and his passenger in there.

04:47 - 05:06
Brian Fielkow: There were fatalities. And that driver of the truck got a gold star for compliance. He was within his hours of service. But he also drove twenty eight hours in his personal vehicle from Atlanta to Delaware right before he reported for duty. He was dead tired.

05:06 - 05:17
Brian Fielkow: So the law, the regs said, This is how long you can drive. Safety requires a lot more. Safety talks about whether or not you should drive. Big difference.

05:18 - 05:27
Aaron Craddock: Yeah. Yeah. We're not talking about legal advice or anything like here. We're just talking about again, yeah, I loved how you frame that. Just compliance does not equal safety.

05:27 - 05:38
Aaron Craddock: Like, we're talking about a safety culture. What do what do fleet executives unknowingly do that contradicts the values that they communicate around safety?

05:39 - 05:59
Brian Fielkow: Yeah, you got to be so careful that safety is not a sign on the wall. The best thing a leader can do is embody it, make sure that safety is a non negotiable core value. And look, we're going to have rough days. We're going to be late for loads. We're going to have customers mad.

05:59 - 06:18
Brian Fielkow: That's what we signed up for. That's part of being in business. But we can never, as a leader, say, Hurry up, take every shortcut, just get it done. I don't care, to make the customer happy. Because ultimately your employees conduct themselves in the environment that you create.

06:18 - 06:47
Brian Fielkow: So as a leader, what you recognize and reward, monetarily or not, what you prioritize, what you tolerate, what you look the other way on determines in large part how employees will conduct themselves. So it's really important that leaders communicate that nothing can compete for safety. And we're going to have days with extreme production pressure. And we're going to have rough days with customers. And I get all that.

06:47 - 07:14
Brian Fielkow: And we'll fix it, but not at the expense of safety. Another thing that leaders have to be very careful about is that they can't ascribe to this myth that safety is the responsibility of the safety department. It's impossible. Your safety professionals, if you've got them on staff, are there to teach, train, coach, mentor, ensure accountability. They've got a critical role.

07:14 - 07:27
Brian Fielkow: But who's responsible for the execution of safety? It can only be operations. Operations have to own safety. They're the ones making the dispatch decisions. They're the ones whose employees have their hands on the wheel.

07:28 - 07:42
Brian Fielkow: So we've got to make sure that we don't delegate safety to the Safety Department, because that never works. It's a team effort. But at the end of the day, operations and only operations is in a position to execute on safety.

07:42 - 07:49
Aaron Craddock: That's awesome. So every team's involved, but the operations team is the one that executes.

07:50 - 08:21
Brian Fielkow: Yeah, they have to. And so you have to make sure that your incentives and your rewards recognize that. So, you know, was always a fan of incentives and rewards, but if I incentivized my operations team only, for example, on on time delivery, guess what I would get? You know, I've got to make sure that my incentives, my rewards, how recognize, promote people, take into account safe and productive. Nobody ever said it was an eitheror decision.

08:21 - 08:32
Brian Fielkow: I want both. I want to be safe and productive, And I want to dispel any idea that safety somehow slows down or impedes productivity because it doesn't. In fact, the opposite is true.

08:32 - 08:43
Aaron Craddock: That's awesome. So why does involving drivers in change, like across your organization, create a greater ownership in that change?

08:43 - 09:37
Brian Fielkow: Because people who are included tend to support. People who are excluded tend to oppose. And one of the mistakes I think a lot of organizations make this goes way beyond safety is we tend to think, All right, those of us sitting around the conference table are the smartest guys in the room, when normally anything other than that is true. You have subject matter experts in your organization, your front lines, your opinion leaders, the ones who kind of command the respect and opinions of the rest of the team. And if you can involve your frontline leaders in decisions, especially when you're making a change, and maybe that change might be controversial, you increase the odds significantly of buy in.

09:37 - 10:07
Brian Fielkow: So at JETCO, for years, we had a driver committee. Notice I didn't call it a safety committee because safety was a part, only a part of what the driver committee was focused on. It was focused holistically on the life of a driver while at Jetco. And that driver committee, by all of our drivers, is how we broke down the silos that so often separate your frontline teams from your office. Those silos are what kill communication.

10:07 - 10:17
Brian Fielkow: They're what erode trust, and they do you no good. So the more you can break that silo down and bring your frontline employees,

10:17 - 10:17
Aaron Craddock: and by the

10:17 - 10:30
Brian Fielkow: way, you don't need to bring them all in, right? Bring in representatives. The more credible your change is, the more you can listen to what are the problems with the change. They're going to have concerns. Many of those concerns are going to be valid.

10:31 - 11:01
Brian Fielkow: We installed, inward and outward facing cameras at a time where it was fairly rare for a fleet our size. By the time we installed them, you know, larger fleets, you know, the real mega carriers, they already had them. But the fleets we were competing against, primarily rare. So we knew that if we just said, Okay, we're putting the cameras in, everybody get used to it, we knew that was going to not be a good result. I'd have a lot of cameras and nobody to drive the trucks.

11:01 - 11:33
Brian Fielkow: So we formed a beta group. We brought drivers in to test the cameras, explain the concerns, run with them for ninety days. And you know, just like bad news travels fast, well, so does good news. And there were stories of tickets being ripped up, of things that drivers otherwise would have been cited for that they weren't. And so during that trial period, our beta group was able to convey to the rest of our team, Hey, this really does protect the company, but you know what?

11:33 - 11:40
Brian Fielkow: It protects us too. Bring your front lines in with you as you make change, and you'll get a better result.

11:41 - 11:59
Aaron Craddock: And didn't you even bring in somebody that was kind of counter to the rear facing camera, like a detractor into the because I think that's one of the things that stuck out into the end of the book. So tell a little bit about that. You actually brought in somebody that wasn't excited about it.

11:59 - 12:17
Brian Fielkow: Oh, no. When we put our trial group together for the cameras, we picked some people that we thought were more likely to support, you know, that they were technologically there. But we picked people that we thought would really hate the idea. We didn't think. We knew because they told us what a terrible idea it was.

12:17 - 12:33
Brian Fielkow: And by the end of the trial, they were like, Okay, I get it. You know, I'm with you. Even if they didn't come up and give us a hug, they were supportive. One naysayers of actually had a significant ticket ripped up. It would have absolutely been a citation.

12:34 - 13:00
Brian Fielkow: But because he had the camera, you know, the officer said, Okay, I get it. And, you know, he really saw it. So yeah, when you're trying to make change and you want to put a group of people together, those that have to live with the change, you want to make sure that group is diverse, experience wise, perception wise, and bring some naysayers in. Because if you win them over, the battle is nearly won.

13:00 - 13:17
Aaron Craddock: That's so good. I even think about just leading my technology team and, like, our team at Hire Truckers, just how important it is to get the buy in and and not just bring in the two or three people that I know are gonna be on board that always say yes, but bring in the person that pokes holes on it.

13:18 - 13:44
Brian Fielkow: Yeah. When making that change, it's always important to explain what's in it for the team. So if we're going to talk about cameras, well, certainly, you know, we're going to talk about continuous improvement in litigation defense, and we're going to check off all the things as to why a company needs to have two way facing cameras. But I want to talk to my drivers about, you know what? This protects your PSP score.

13:44 - 14:00
Brian Fielkow: And while I want you to work here for a good long time, if you don't, that PSP score is your ticket to the best jobs. So there's something big in it for you also. So make sure you always talk about what's in it for the organization, but also what's in it for the employees.

14:00 - 14:06
Aaron Craddock: That's awesome. Yeah. Always tie tie it into what's in it for the drivers. I love that.

14:06 - 14:24
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14:25 - 14:54
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14:55 - 15:02
Aaron Craddock: So next question is, what does clear communication sound like when a leader doesn't yet have all the answers?

15:02 - 15:46
Brian Fielkow: Well, when a leader doesn't have all the answers, some people say, you know, Fake it till you make it. I don't. I go in search of the answers. So to me, if I'm struggling with something, right, something doesn't feel right, it's a performance issue or productivity issue, maybe it's a safety issue, To me, I think showing up humbly and showing up to that group of your leaders, your subject matter experts in different areas of the company, your drivers, your shop, sales, finance, operations, etcetera, and putting together focus groups that will help you get where you want to go. That to me is what it looks like.

15:46 - 16:14
Brian Fielkow: It's saying, Look, here are some things that are going really well, but here are some things where I can't put my finger on it, but I've got just this instinct that something has to change. And you know what? Trust your gut. Your gut is usually right. And if you talk about it, and again, bring those same types of people in, they're going to lead you to exactly where you're going to find your solutions and find your next steps.

16:15 - 16:46
Brian Fielkow: Good examples, I mentioned our frontline leaders, the driver committee that our drivers elected. Well, I didn't brilliantly come up with the driver committee idea. I put together a group of my managers and some drivers. We had a focus session because retention, our retention was usually pretty good, but it was slipping. And service was, you know, I just felt like, you know, around the edges, things weren't going quite as well as we were used to.

16:46 - 17:02
Brian Fielkow: And I felt it in my gut. And we sat down and talked about it. And you know what? As we grew, the newer drivers hadn't connected with the organization the way the more senior drivers had. We viewed that as a real problem that we weren't anchoring the way we should.

17:02 - 17:39
Brian Fielkow: We put this committee together to harness the power more formally of our frontline leaders, and that worked. But again, I came to the table sensing the problem, having some data to describe the problem, but no real diagnosis. Because I kind of came with the idea that let's talk, let's listen, that's how we got there. So that, to me, is how I always overcame those periods, which is just being transparent, explaining the problem, and then doing a lot of listening.

17:40 - 17:57
Aaron Craddock: Yeah, we're talking to fleets right now that are starting to have some of those problems where retention rate hasn't spiked. Like, let's say they had a 35% retention rate. They're doing really good versus the 90 plus percent industry average of turnover turnover rate.

17:57 - 17:58
Brian Fielkow: Mhmm.

17:58 - 18:29
Aaron Craddock: And let's say so they're starting to see maybe 10 percentage slippage just as driver competition heats up. And they're having to look into areas that they hadn't just haven't put a microscope on in the last few years. So if a company is going like, let's say they have 20 recruiters, because a lot these executives we're talking to are recruiting teams, which also work with ops and with safety. They're heavily integrated in in most cases. But where where should they start?

18:29 - 18:39
Aaron Craddock: Like, let's say their attention rate just popped up 10%, like, their turnover rate. Where should they where should they start? Because it sounds like you've done that.

18:39 - 19:18
Brian Fielkow: Yeah, I mean, you look at why. And when you get a market that's gone from pretty flat to robust real quick, well, now all of a sudden, the signing bonus signs go up. So people are, especially if you've got a good reputation and your drivers have clean PSP scores and good safety culture, there's a premium for those drivers. So you've got to protect them. And sometimes it's just, you you might know you're going to lose some on the margins, but what you really want to focus on is just make sure you remember, like, who was there during the downtimes.

19:18 - 19:47
Brian Fielkow: You want to make sure that you're telling your long term story and you're reminding people that we've been through the cycles, we've survived, and that the people that are trying to buy love right now with the signing bonuses probably might be the first to cut you as soon as the market turns. We're in this for the long run. So I think it's really important to kind of have those conversations with your team. Be transparent about it. I don't feel the need to match that signing bonus.

19:49 - 20:14
Brian Fielkow: And then you got to make sure you're on top of the market. And an area where maybe there's times where we got behind is rates went up. You know, we also needed to make sure our pay kept with the rates. You know, because your pay tended to move with the market. If you move too slow, the market's going to hand you a pretty unpleasant surprise.

20:14 - 20:22
Brian Fielkow: So you've got to just make sure that you're paying fairly and that you're hiring people who are thinking for the long term.

20:23 - 20:50
Aaron Craddock: I'm taking notes. This is so good. So next, I wanted to go into why why are drivers first ninety days so critical to to a culture of safety? Like, not not just the first two days, where you do an orientation and getting them on the road or first week. But why is that whole first ninety days so important towards a safety culture, retention, things like that?

20:51 - 21:22
Brian Fielkow: I mean, think about any job that you've started. I would challenge anybody on this call to think about a job they've started. And after that first week or those first couple of days, did you know that you wanted to be at that organization long term? I mean, it's highly unlikely because the reality is it takes the company a while and it takes you a while to evaluate each other. You can't force that.

21:22 - 21:48
Brian Fielkow: You can force a whole bunch of videos and a whole bunch of training, and you can cram that into a couple days. I'm not sure what that accomplishes besides checking the boxes, but it doesn't accomplish what you really want, which is to integrate people into your culture. And you just have to accept that that takes time. You can't force it. In my experience, if I look back, I think it takes a good one hundred and eighty days on average to properly integrate somebody.

21:48 - 22:05
Brian Fielkow: Now does that mean that you're keeping them off the road for one hundred and eighty days? Of course not. Of course not. You do what you need to, to get people on the road. But any training that can wait, that's not essential before I give you the keys, do it a week later, do it a month later, spread it out.

22:05 - 22:33
Brian Fielkow: And then what really works is to be structured in how you check-in. So maybe fifteen days in, you know, HR is calling. And thirty days in, maybe it's a sit down with your dispatcher. Not to talk about loads, to talk about, hey, are we delivering the promises we made when, we recruited you? You know, is the pay accurate?

22:33 - 22:56
Brian Fielkow: Any questions about the payroll? Right? Maybe ninety days into it, maybe a COO or a VP calls just to say, Hey, how's it going? It's these touch points that have to last way beyond the best intentioned orientation program. And by the way, when I was saying before about the videos and the orientation, you've got to do that, okay?

22:56 - 23:24
Brian Fielkow: And you don't want to send somebody out without going through your orientation. I just want to make the point that it's really hard in a two day period to do anything more than cover the basics. It takes that much longer time. And when it comes to training in general, I am a huge fan of micro lessons. I'd rather train you five, ten minutes a week than sit you down for a whole quarter with a fire hose of content.

23:24 - 24:07
Brian Fielkow: People learn better in that type of scenario. So I'm also a fan of virtual remote training, tablet based combined with in person. I want the best of both because then we're building relationships, but we're not slowing people down once a week for a formal meeting. So I think if you can combine a learning management system and technology with individual not individual, but personalized training, that's the best practice. But no matter what it is, just understand and accept that in that two day period, that one week period, you're not going to anchor the employee into your culture.

24:07 - 24:31
Brian Fielkow: Another best practice that really works well is for you enlist the help of some of your more senior employees, ones that get it, ones that have been there, and make sure that they're mentoring the newer hires. They can show the new hires the ropes. They can tell the new hires, look, come to me with a question. There is no such thing as a dumb question. The only dumb question is the one you don't ask.

24:31 - 24:58
Brian Fielkow: But sometimes people are afraid to go to their dispatcher or to their manager. I get that. Your peer to peer, it can create a safe harbor for mentorship, for questions, for hazard recognition. And so the more you can bring in your peers, some of your more senior employees, the better. And it sends them a fantastic message because what you're telling them is, I trust you.

24:58 - 25:17
Aaron Craddock: So good. So you just touched on the peer mentor program that we're going go into. So next question is, and this is our last one as we wrap. So how have top companies successfully involved employees' families into building a safety culture?

25:18 - 25:42
Brian Fielkow: Well, there's a lot of ways to do it. But let's understand that safety is not defined on a spreadsheet. Safety has to start in the heart. And we have to remember, why are we focusing on safety now? I can get out the spreadsheet, and I can show you the return on investment, and I can show you insurance costs.

25:42 - 26:07
Brian Fielkow: I can show you DOT fines and all that. But that is secondary. All that is backseat to, we want to get you home safely. And so engaging the families makes sure that we have another set of eyes and ears, making sure that, their loved ones are coming to work well rested, right? They're not up in the middle of the night and then getting up at six in the morning.

26:08 - 26:33
Brian Fielkow: That they're looking out for safety. One thing we would do is a home run. We would send home a blank piece of paper, a box of crayons, a letter asking, families, kids, nieces, nephews, grandkids, to draw out what does safety mean to them. We had a safety brand. It was called Driving to Perfection.

26:33 - 27:17
Brian Fielkow: So what does D2P mean to me? And we get this crazy good artwork from the kids, which told us that safety was actually getting into the families. That artwork then became our annual calendar that we gave to our families, we gave to our customers to make sure that we were closing the loop between our customers, families, and employees that, you know, take care of our drivers while they're running your load, while they're at your docks. When we did family events, we tried to do them at our yard so we could close down parts of the yard, you know, make it safe. And kids loved coming in to see the trucks that mom or dad drives or going into the office or going into the shop.

27:18 - 27:42
Brian Fielkow: So letting families kind of put their hands on and understand what their loved ones do, first of all, it was awe inspiring. It just drove a lot of pride, But also, it's like, that's a big truck. And my mom or my dad is driving that thing. And I better make sure that they're cared for and that they're focused on it, that I'm not calling and retesting every five minutes. All that can wait.

27:43 - 27:58
Brian Fielkow: So you've got to engage your families in the safety mission. It really, really helps. Make sure the families understand. We would also send letters home, okay? But when we sent letters home, we weren't talking about the federal regulations and the rules.

27:58 - 28:30
Brian Fielkow: If we were going to talk about distracted driving, we were going to talk about your 16 year old, your 17 year old kid in the cell phone. If we were going to talk about working from heights, we would talk about stringing lights on your house during the holidays, right? Working on the roof. So we would take the safety principles that we were trying to teach in the commercial environment, in the trucking environment, and bring them to home and translate them to the home so that they were relatable.

28:31 - 28:46
Aaron Craddock: I love that. I just thought the artwork example was so cool. And just getting the kids involved. I young kids, six, three, one, and one on the way. They're just so proud of their yeah, thank you.

28:47 - 29:12
Aaron Craddock: So proud of their artwork that they make for me pretty often that they give to me when I get home. That's so cool. So thank you so much, Brian, for your time today. I want to make sure, like, if you got value today in joining our show that you go get Brian's book. So it is Making Safety Happen by Brian Philco.

29:12 - 29:27
Aaron Craddock: We're gonna have it in the YouTube show notes, in the podcast notes, everywhere. I grabbed it on Audible to listen to it in preparation for our show today, so it is available there. Yeah, just Brian, just thank you so much for your time today.

29:27 - 29:33
Brian Fielkow: Well, thank you. And I hope the conversation was helpful for your audience. And let's keep the conversation going. Thanks for your time.