Gathering and acting on employee feedback is something that has genuinely been revolutionised by technology in the last few years.
Many companies have moved away from the annual staff survey and are continuously gathering data from their employees and building strategies based on it.
One such organisation is Celadon Trucking who have been using employee feedback to strategically address the recruiting and retention challenges that are endemic in their industry. My guest this week is the VP of Marketing at Celadon Trucking, Whitney Boyer
In the interview we discuss:
• The recruiting and retention challenges in the industry
• Why the responsibility for talent attraction sits with the marketing department
• Using employee feedback to identify why drivers are leaving and set new business practices
• Addressing unique issues via comment boxes
• Building a Retention Team
• The power of integrating SurveyMonkey and Salesforce to share feedback around the company
• Overcoming the fear of giving negative feedback
• Using positive feedback as messaging for recruitment marketing
Whitney also talks us through the results seen so far and the plans to build more sophistication into their surveys as they move forward.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by SurveyMonkey for HR SurveyMonkey helps solve some of the toughest challenges facing human resources professionals today. From recruiting to retention to offboarding, SurveyMonkey gives you the expertise, speed and scale you need to collect any type of employee feedback. So whether you want to improve your employee experience, increase employee engagement, or streamline program application management, SurveyMonkey can help start collecting and acting on employee feedback. To attract, engage and retain top talent for your business. Visit surveymonkey.com future that’s surveymonkey.com future today. And learn how to start building a better workplace.
Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 170 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Gathering and acting on employee feedback is something that has genuinely been revolutionized by technology in recent years. Many companies have moved away from the annual staff survey and are continuously gathering data from their employees and building strategies based around it. One such company is Celadon Trucking, who’ve been using employee feedback to strategically address the recruitment and retention challenges that are endemic in their industry. My guest this week to talk us through what they do is their VP of marketing, Whitney Boyer. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Hi, Whitney, and welcome to the show.
Whitney Boyer [00:01:58]:
Hi, Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:59]:
I’m absolutely fantastic. Than. Thank you. A pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Whitney Boyer [00:02:08]:
Sure. My name is Whitney Boyer. I am the VP of marketing here at Celadon Trucking.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Fantastic. So could you give us a bit of background into Celadon Trucking? You know, maybe tell us a bit about the industry and the kind of recruiting challenges that you’re currently facing?
Whitney Boyer [00:02:24]:
Sure. So our marketing department mainly focuses on the recruiting side of things, and it’s strictly with driver recruiting. One of the biggest challenges in the industry is that there’s a really huge driver shortage right now. So continuing to kind of attract new talent is an ongoing challenge for us and the entire industry. All of our competitors have the same issues as well. Another big challenge is that, you know, since there’s such a shortage, there is a competitive. It’s just, it’s really hard for us to attract new talent. Another major issue issue kind of is turnover in the industry. The industry standard is around 100% turnover. So that’s something that we’re kind of constantly being aware of and really focusing on and trying to improve. We want to keep the drivers that we have since it’s becoming more difficult to find new talent.
Matt Alder [00:03:19]:
So you’re sitting in the marketing department, but the marketing department has a focus on recruiting. Why does the structure work like that?
Whitney Boyer [00:03:25]:
Well, that’s just kind of traditionally how it’s always been. But hiring drivers is such a huge piece of our business. It’s one of the most important things that we do. We have a whole recruiting department, but the recruiting department needs us to bring in those qualified leads so they have drivers to reach out to. So it’s just. It’s a really big challenge. They need a full department kind of dedicated to assisting the recruiting team.
Matt Alder [00:03:49]:
So obviously, you know, you’re working in a very challenging environment. What’s your main focus? What’s the thing that you sort of set out to improve the most that you think will have the sort of the biggest impact on your business?
Whitney Boyer [00:04:02]:
Sure. So we’re really focused on the retention piece. We want to keep the drivers that we have. It costs much more for our company to bring in a new driver than it does to keep our existing drivers. So our whole goal is to kind of identify why drivers are leaving and then set some new business practices around whatever we’re able to discover.
Matt Alder [00:04:25]:
And what are some of the tactics you’ve used to achieve that.
Whitney Boyer [00:04:29]:
So the biggest thing that we started doing, we first needed to figure out why drivers are leaving. We kind of. We think that we know why, but we wanted to hear it from the drivers ourselves. So we started sending our Drivers surveys through SurveyMonkey. We have all of their email addresses, so we would be able to automate emails. We started out with a smaller group of drivers that we were kind of able to identify was the most at risk range. And it’s those drivers that have been employed with us for less than 90 days. So we started sending surveys to those drivers right when they started, right after they complete orientation. Called out our onboarding survey. Then we sent out a survey after they’ve been employed for 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. So we really were just trying to collect data in the beginning. We were asking them kind of what they thought about Celadyne, what departments they’d interacted with, what departments they hadn’t interacted with, if they’d had any issues, where were the issues? We also wanted to know if things were going right, what was going right. So we were really just using these first few months kind of collecting data to try to identify the problem.
Matt Alder [00:05:33]:
And so what feedback did you get from it? Were there any sort of interesting insights? Was there anything that surprised you from that sort of first pilot program?
Whitney Boyer [00:05:43]:
Yeah. So our whole goal initially was to look for bigger trends. We kind of just wanted to see if there was a specific department that was an issue or if there. I think we were kind of assuming there was one big maybe quick fix that we could do. So that’s kind of what we were looking for in the beginning, what ended up happening and kind of now how we’re modeling our whole new program. But what we ended up finding was that we were able to address very specific, unique driver problems through these surveys. We had comment boxes with each question and we built an entire team because of the responses that we were getting. We built an entire team whose sole job is to focus on retention. They go through every single survey that we get and follow up with every single driver who had any kind of issue. And we were really able to save a lot of these drivers just by fixing something small. So we did find some larger industry trends that kind of confirmed what we already assumed. Drivers want to be home a lot more. Drivers want the opportunity to get a lot of bonuses. They want to be paid fairly. We kind of assumed all of those things. We kind of knew all of those things. The surveys did confirm that, but we really found the most value out of addressing a survey individually, kind of. Kind of going that round of looking for larger trends.
Matt Alder [00:07:03]:
So you mentioned that you’ve got a retention team. How is the sort of feedback shared with the. With the wider business? Were different teams involved in sort of taking action and fixing problems?
Whitney Boyer [00:07:17]:
This has been the biggest area of value for sure. We are able to integrate our surveymonkey surveys and results with Salesforce and then every driver facing department has access to those surveys to see how the driver responded. So the driver managers who the drivers communicate with on a daily basis, they’re able to go in there and kind of see if the drivers are having any issues. But as far as the retention team, they can. They kind of do a lot of automated stuff in addition to addressing these specifically, but they’re able to go in and look at these surveys, read through them, flag them. They can flag the sentiment. So is it a survey, is it a positive survey, or is it a negative survey? They can kind of go through and look at that. All of that again is pushed into Salesforce. So all the driver facing departments have access to it. But then we’re also able to score each one of the surveys. So every question has a point value. And if the drivers rank too low or they rank too high, it automatically will create a case In Salesforce, it’s called a driver issue case. And then every department relating to that specific issue is tagged and the retention team can see it and is notified, and they’re responsible for following up with that driver issue case to make sure that someone is looking into it, making sure that problem is solved, and then reaching out to the driver to see how the whole process went. So through our integration with Salesforce, every department is able to see these survey results, and we’ve been able to save a huge. A huge amount of drivers from it.
Matt Alder [00:08:54]:
How have the drivers reacted to having this kind of channel to voice their feelings?
Whitney Boyer [00:09:00]:
So they definitely like every opportunity to provide results, or, I mean, provide feedback. They’re always looking for ways to provide feedback. So they really like the surveys, something that we’re kind of going back and forth on. And again, this is just addressing a problem within the company that we eventually need to figure out how to solve. But some of them, we realized, were only giving us positive results because they were afraid that if they gave negative results that their driver manager would be unhappy with them and they wouldn’t give them the loads that they wanted. So we’re trying to address with the driver managers, hey, you know, you need to have better communication with your drivers, let them know why we’re asking these questions, why we’re sending out these surveys. So the drivers have liked being able to provide feedback, though. Another thing we’ve kind of heard, which again, is something that we need to work on, a lot of them will say, you know, it’s too late. We’ve already had all of these issues. We wish you would have reached out sooner. So as we continue sending out more surveys, as we continue kind of optimizing when we’re sending surveys, I think we’re going to get less and less of that feedback. But that’s just more information that we want, more data that we can collect and just learning more things that we need to improve on.
Matt Alder [00:10:21]:
And sort of, overall, what kind of results have you seen and how have you been using those results as a recruiting tool?
Whitney Boyer [00:10:29]:
So the results have been really great. And a lot of it has to do with the surveys. A lot of it has to do with some other company initiatives that we put in place. But like I said, the industry standard for turnover is around 100%. And from 2017 to 2018, we were able to improve our retention rate by 68%. So it was a huge win for us, a huge success for us. And we think moving forward, we’re going to continue to see a lot of really great results. So that’s been one of the biggest metrics that we can measure is we actually are saving a lot of these drivers. We are making a big difference. And drivers are happier because they know how to get in contact with us and provide feedback and they know what to do now if they are having an issue. That’s been one of the biggest changes that we’ve seen. Another one. So kind of another program that we put in place. After these drivers fill out these surveys and the retention team or the automated tool marks the sentiment, we send a follow up email to all of the drivers that responded positively in the surveys. We say, hey, we’re really glad you’re having a great time at Celadon. We’d love for you to write a review, we’d love for you to post on Facebook. So we include some links in those follow up surveys and that’s been able to really improve our positive feedback as well. I think that was around about 25%. If you’re looking at positive to negative surveys, it’s improved about 25% in the past five months.
Matt Alder [00:12:05]:
Fantastic. And are they sort of stats that you use in your recruitment messaging to sort of try and bring more drivers into the business?
Whitney Boyer [00:12:13]:
Definitely, directly and indirectly. So we’re, we’re kind of able to advertise some of the results we found about drivers wanting to retire with Celadon. That’s been a really positive one. Drivers who were referred to the company, which is very important to other drivers. And one of the biggest things that we’ve been able to do. And again, this is through that sentiment reading and sending the drivers a positive survey, asking them to fill out some reviews online. We know for sure that drivers go to our Facebook page and they see what other drivers are saying. They go and check out the Google reviews on what other drivers are saying. So by being able to get more of those positive reviews, it’s really helping in our recruiting process. We’re getting a lot more calls from drivers asking about our company and it’s had really good results for on the recruiting side as well.
Matt Alder [00:13:07]:
So final question, what’s next? How are you sort of planning on, you know, moving things forward in the next 12 to 18 months?
Unknown [00:13:15]:
Yeah.
Whitney Boyer [00:13:16]:
So we’ve had about a year’s worth of data to collect and I kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, but we were really looking for bigger trends. We’re asking about specific departments, just trying to kind of collect data for the past year. So we’re revamping all of our surveys. We have everything about ready to go. We’re getting it all integrated with Salesforce as well again so we can track it all. We’re going to simplify what the drivers actually have to do. We’re going to change what we’re asking and how we’re asking it based on the results that we’ve gathered over the past year. We’re going to start sending surveys out in different ways. In the past, we were just doing email. We’re going to try a few different ways to get the surveys to the drivers. That’s a pretty big change and really just simplifying the process for the driver. It’s going to be easier questions. We’re also doing a lot more logic and with our surveys. So based on questions that drivers answer, it’ll take them down a different path. But we have a very clear goal in mind for this next year on the type of feedback we want to get. We’re not looking for as many large trends. We want to identify smaller, more specific issues, and we really want to be able to target drivers before they can complain about their issues or before they quit. We want to be a little more proactive instead of reactive. So that’s kind of our biggest goal for 2018 and just making sure our surveys match what our goals are and what data we want and what our plan is to save some of these drivers.
Matt Alder [00:14:48]:
Whitney, thank you very much for talking to me.
Whitney Boyer [00:14:51]:
No problem. Thank you very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:14:53]:
My thanks to Whitney Boyer. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
