Speeding, slushies and surprising opportunities

September 18, 2024

There’s always something enjoyable about this safety conference. Between the timely general sessions, the roundtable discussions and the creative approaches to solving fleet problems, the group at the fall NPTC safety conference are quick to dig into issues and pull them apart (as I’ve mentioned before). One of the consistent features I’ve seen in their discussions is a willingness to find solutions in different places, rather than just grinding away at the problem in the same old way each time. Here’s an example:

Slushies

I was told a story about a fleet that was using a data-driven fuel app that would tell drivers which stations on which routes had the cheapest fuel (and would direct them there by linking to their regular map app). In one case, though, they found that a driver on a particular route regularly avoided a recommended fuel location and instead went to one that was sometimes up to 40 cents more expensive. And to be clear, these two stations were in view of each other, almost directly across the road. Yet he kept choosing the more expensive fuel. Why?

Because he really liked the slushies at that particular station.

In some fleets, a driver making a choice like that would get raked over the coals—just think about the cost savings they had been missing. In the case of this fleet, though, they did something else—they bought him a gift card for a year’s supply of slushies. They gave it to him on the condition that he would fill up at the cheaper station first and then go across the road and get his treat. For that small investment, they kept a driver, kept a driver happy, and are now enjoying thousands of dollars in savings. A costly problem met with an unexpected solution.

Collaboration

More generally, when the folks at NPTC get together, there’s an eagerness to find and share different approaches and best practices that I haven’t seen in too many other conference groups. In the roundtable discussions, companies who might otherwise be competitors regularly ask things like, “How are you getting those results? Has anyone faced something like this before? Who should I talk to to fix that?” These are folks who are just interested in solving problems and getting better, rather than trying to edge out the competition by keeping things to themselves. They’re not sharing everything, obviously, but the point is that there is an open approach to helping colleagues solve problems in ways they may not have thought of before.

Speeding

In one of the general sessions, there was a session on reducing speeding, but in particular, it was about how the wrong approach (however well-intentioned) can have disastrous results. At the speaker’s first company, they were trying to get a handle on speeding as part of a broader safety push, so they brought out the hammer. They had a highly structured focus on bringing down everyone’s speed (whether someone is doing 40 in a 25 or 80 in a 60). Their approach gave almost no management flexibility and people were getting fired left and right.

The result? Drivers’ speeds did come down, but people were so terrified of coming to work and getting fired for one infraction that they were all running significantly under the speed limit—so much so that, in some cases, it was taking almost twice as long to make some deliveries. It slowed the fleet down, to be sure, but the knock-on effects were disastrous.

At the speaker’s second company, they tried something different. They focused only on the worst offenders (those driving in excess of 80mph). By clamping down on just those events and drivers, they saw an interesting result—speeding went down for the whole company without seeing the dip in morale or on-time deliveries seen in the first example. Everyone saw that the company was taking speeding seriously, even if infractions at lower speeds weren’t getting the same attention as the over-80 club.

The salient point here isn’t the approach and result this company got in the second example. What’s more interesting to me is the speaker’s willingness to highlight how badly their first approach went. To look at it, it was well thought out and executed—and yet it still flopped.

And that kind of humility and willingness to have a candid discussion is one of the things that makes this conference work. It isn’t just about collecting best practices, it’s also about sharing worst practices so everyone can learn from past mistakes.

The National Private Truck Council's 2024 Safety Conference took place in Orlando, Florida from September 04-06.