Creating A Retention Action Plan
It's not how many you hire. It's how many you keep.
Step 1
Build the plan
Retention is a team effort. Getting the right team members involved, aligning your message, and training your front-line leaders is crucial to reducing turnover and defining your culture.
As part of the building process, make sure that you account for training your managers regarding your delivery expectations. With proper tools in place, you can also easily adjust your messages as you evaluate results. This system will eventually become foundational building blocks of your fleet's corporate culture.
Step 2
Identify specific focus areas
Veterans are your most costly loss, however, most of your turnover occurs within the first 90 days.
Developing unique plans to address both scenarios is required. Your plans must include a disciplined approach for addressing both common concerns and performance related issues. Whether concerns are rooted in safety, service, vehicle care, or any other area, EVERY termination indicates a failure in one of your processes.
Create plans that clearly communicate expectations, change behaviors, and document efforts. Then, train your leaders to deliver the message effectively and consistently. While evaluating results, determine if the losses were the result of a poor exchange of expectations, a lack of buy-in to your messaging, a poor delivery of your message, or, in very rare cases, poor candidate selection.
Whether it's a veteran or a new guy, turnvover hurts. It's important to address all sources of concern.
Step 3
Execute the plan
No amount of planning is going to impact turnover without action – consistent and sustainable action. Your plan must proactively address common concerns before those concerns become losses.
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to drive actions that always facilitate consistent engagement between your drivers and managers - not just when an issue has already occurred.
You also need to make sure that your plan is sustainable. Let’s face it, there A LOT of issues that are competing for your attention and that require your focus. When your focus gets pulled in other directions, your plan should continue to be executed as expected. This can be easily accomplished through automation.
Step 4
Measure results
“What’s measured improves” isn’t the whole story - what we measure matters.
On the road or in the office, we all know measuring our actions properly helps us improve.
Rather than measure turnover itself, measure your actions that change behaviors and reduce circumstances that result in turnover. You must create an objective measuring process to drive accountability for success as well as deficiencies.
Your key measures should not only identify managers that need development but also identify your most effective efforts.
This data lets you allocate your resources to the areas that need your attention while replicating your best practices.
Next Steps
Contact us and we will help you develop your action plan to reduce turnover. Engage with us and Pivotal Retention will automate, sustain, and scale it across your fleet.
Pivotal Retention’s platform allows you to customize, automate, and measure action plans to reduce driver turnover across your entire fleet.
Contact Tim:
Phone: (630) 310-6724
Email: tim@pivotalretention.com
Schedule Meeting