How value gaps are impacting your training

November 8, 2023

At the recent American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas, researcher Rich Thau of Engagious shared some of his findings from his current Swing Voter Project. The project involves interviewing and examining voters who switched their voting preferences from Obama to Trump in the 2016 election as well as voters who switched from Trump to Biden in 2020, to figure out why they think like they do.

In one focus group on the adoption of autonomous trucks, when told about a study that showed that 94% of all traffic accidents were the result of human error, some respondents still refused to accept that driverless vehicles could be safer. When asked what it would take to change their minds, the response was “lots and lots of data”.

Someone in the audience at the conference asked Thau how much data would be enough to change their minds, and Thau’s answer was surprising: no amount would be enough. And that’s because their core belief—their distrust of autonomous vehicles— was the real issue, not how much information was available. And, as Thau said, “When the values [the core belief] of the speaker and the listener don’t align, the facts don’t matter.” If you’re trying to convince someone of something but they already disagree with you at a fundamental level, no amount of evidence will bring them over to your side.

Now, this isn’t a new idea, but it got me thinking about what it means in terms of safety, training and company culture.

Trust deficits and value gaps

In a way, your drivers are your swing voters—they’re here now, but they could move on to somewhere else in the future. And for all the positive things that you can list about your company, if there is a gap between their core beliefs about the company and what you are trying to tell them, you might have a problem.

“This company doesn’t give a damn about us—they just want to make money.” If you’ve ever heard a driver say this or something like it, what it describes is an us-vs-them view of the organization. If you’re the one tasked with getting the drivers to do their training (or anything else, for that matter), they’re going to see you in the “them” category rather than the “us” category, and anything you say is going to be treated with suspicion. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter—if they believe it then you’ve got an obstacle.

The value gap here is about them believing you don’t have their interests in mind when you ask them to do something—that you’re just trying to get more out of them for the sake of the company. If their perception is that your values don’t match up with theirs, whatever you say is going to be trusted a little bit less. You can show them all the data in the world about how doing things a certain way will make them safer—but they still won’t trust the source.

Note: in some places, I’ve said ‘a gap in values’ and in others I used ‘a perceived gap in values’—but the difference actually doesn’t matter. If the person you’re speaking to just thinks that you’re untrustworthy, you still have to figure out a way around it. It might be frustrating when you’re actually trying to have an honest conversation with them, but the reality is that message perceived is message received—if they think something is true, then that’s the thing you have to deal with. So how can you deal with it?

Tactics and strategy

What we’re really talking about here is having a company culture that includes and recognizes drivers as part of the team (you can find a discussion of different kinds of fleet culture here). Getting your drivers onside with the company culture takes time and effort—it needs a long-term strategy to reshape it so that everyone is on the same page, and that doesn’t happen overnight (and requires more room than I have here to talk about it).

In the short term, there are some tricks you can use to bridge the gap between speakers and listeners.

• Ask questions
  Rather than just pouring out a string of ‘do this, do that’ messaging, take some time to listen to what’s going on for your drivers. Demonstrating a willingness to listen is crucial for two people to find common ground, and it gives you a chance to gather information and figure out what kind of a problem you’re up against.
• Use personal stories
  If you are trying to get your drivers to pay more attention to, say, cargo securement, share your own stories of things going wrong when you didn’t pay attention to securing your cargo. Personal stories are a way of humanizing what you are saying—it’s harder to be suspicious of your motives if you’re being real with them about something that happened to you. When there is a trust gap, personal stories feel more real than straight-up facts.
• Empathize
  Even if you don’t agree with what they are saying, it’s important to acknowledge their viewpoint without criticizing them. If they say something like “This company doesn’t give a damn about me, they just want to make money”, start by acknowledging that that’s a real feeling for them. If you push back right away before they can get it all out, they won’t see you as an open and trustworthy listener. Remember—you may have a bunch of facts and arguments that can refute everything they are saying, but until they trust you more and see that your values are more closely aligned, they’re less likely to believe you.

Remember to be patient

Look, if you are just trying to get your driver to do the damn training, there are ways you can force them to do it. But if you're getting pushback because of a value gap, that problem is showing up in other areas of your communications and company culture— and it’s going to get worse the more you just try to bulldoze to get your way. You’re going to have to deal with it at some point, and fixing it is a long game that will require some patience.

Remember that each interaction with your drivers—even the bad interactions—is an opportunity to learn more about what’s going on for them. But the more you show up for them and use strategies to bridge the gap, the easier each one is going to get and the more uptake you are going to see down the road. Doing that successfully is going to take a lot of people skills and emotional intelligence on your part, but it will pay off when the trust deficit shrinks.