The shifting workplace: what trucking can learn from the mistakes of others

Mark Murrell

March 5, 2025

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”
~ Warren Buffett

Trucking is not an industry of early adopters.

Some industries are full of companies that are eager to try new things, but trucking is not one of them. There are certainly some people in the industry more adventurous than others, but as an industry trucking is generally slower to adopt new technologies and business processes. Using the classic Crossing the Chasm model of technology adoption, trucking fits squarely in the “late majority” category.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The “early adopter” and “early majority” people spend a lot of time dealing with problems while trying to figure out the best way to do something. By the time the late majority get involved, most of those problems have been resolved and it’s much less painful to get to the promised benefits.

As long as you know how to learn from the mistakes of others, that is. Late adopters who don’t learn from the mistakes of those who came before are doomed to repeat those mistakes, as well as losing time and falling behind competitively.

Trucking is at a point right now where, as an industry, it’s starting to get serious about adopting some technologies and business processes that have become standard practice in other industries. As a result, there’s a lot that can be learned about how best to implement those things, and how to avoid the headaches that others have had to endure.

For this month’s blog, we’re going to look at some of those things, and see what best practices we can learn from other industries.

Online training

When we first launched CarriersEdge, back in 2005, we had already spent years building online training for industries like finance, telecom, energy, and several others where it was an established part of employee training. Trucking, however, was highly skeptical – “drivers can’t use computers” was a common response at the time.

Fast forward to today and the situation is completely different. In the 2025 edition of Best Fleets to Drive For, for the first time, the primary means of delivering driver training was online. In many fleets, it’s just about the only training being offered for drivers. That’s a huge shift.

Other industries saw a similarly large swing when moving online, and learned some important lessons along the way.

The most important lesson is that there is such a thing as “too much online”. When the bulk of the training is online, employees tend to lose interest and the novelty of “anytime, anywhere” fades. I once worked for a company that tried moving 90% of employee training online, and half way through the first year they had to drop that down to 60% because employees were rebelling against it. It just didn’t work having that much training online.

We’re starting to see seeds of the same thing happening in trucking. Drivers right now are feeling disconnected, unsettled, and anxious, and with all or most training delivered online, those feelings just get worse.

To have real success with online, it needs to be balanced with in-person activities like classroom or practical. Even if the classroom is virtual, the process of getting people together to learn as a group balances nicely with self-paced online training.

(I fully acknowledge the irony of me saying “do less online” but it’s a matter of finding balance.)

Employee surveys

For the first 10 years that we ran the Best Fleets program, we said the same thing every year: Ask your drivers what they think; online surveys are cheap and easy so put some surveys out. Other industries were already using employee surveys regularly to gauge sentiment and collect feedback, and we knew it would work in trucking as well. In the 7 years since then, surveys have become commonplace in trucking, so much so that we’re now faced with a new problem: survey burnout.

Outside of trucking, companies discovered that online surveys were an easy way to get feedback and started doing more of them. Unfortunately, though, the quality of participation drops as the number and frequency of surveys increases – people just get sick of filling out surveys. At that point, feedback collection found a balance – some online surveys, but also phone call outreach, town halls, and informal meetings were all combined to get better insights with more reliability.

Trucking is at a similar crossroads now. Pre-COVID, we saw fleets regularly using phone calls and town halls to collect input from drivers. COVID moved all of that online and it was too much. A few fleets are starting to realize that and scale back the online surveys in favor of in-person communication, but we’re definitely at an inflection point with online surveys.

Performance management

For years, fleet safety professionals were scrounging for any data they could get to help separate good drivers from bad. Quarterly safety bonuses typically centered on crashes, roadside inspections, logbook compliance, and other basic metrics because that’s all that anybody had to work with. Driver performance reviews consisted of a discussion of those items, a breakdown of how much of the bonus had been earned in the quarter, and what to do to improve next time.

Then the technology arrived.

Once telematics, ELDs, dashcams, and scorecards came in, safety managers had all the data points they could dream of, and tons of insights into which drivers were performing better and why. Those scorecards are increasingly available to drivers on demand, so the old quarterly review of bonus qualification is no longer necessary.

This leaves the fleet in a quandary – why do a performance review with a driver when they can see exactly how well they’re doing at any given time on their own?

In other industries, there have been granular performance metrics available for decades, so companies shifted performance reviews in a completely different direction. Instead of focusing on stats and numbers, they started focusing on the qualities and attributes that contribute to great numbers.

Once you have a mountain of data articulating exceptional performance, it’s a lot easier to start identifying the work habits, personal attributes, and behavioral qualities that best contribute to that performance. That’s where the performance review becomes really valuable – working with drivers to develop the qualities that will make them exceptional in the future.

In other industries, performance reviews become more about discussing those qualities, creating a plan to improve on them, and measuring the progress against plans from previous quarters. It’s a level removed from just reviewing the hard numbers, but it’s more valuable in the long run.

We’re just starting to see the first hints of that coming in trucking. In this year’s Best Fleets data, we saw many fleets recognizing that the old performance review model didn’t work, and a few trying some new things to replace it. Very few are thinking about “qualities and attributes” but that’s the direction that we’re headed. Drivers want those reviews, they want to have discussions about how to get better, and they absolutely want the career progression that comes with it.

These are just a few examples, but there are many places where trucking is starting to adapt technologies and processes that are already established elsewhere. Looking at how those other industries faced these challenges, and what they’ve learned along the way, can be a big help in getting new ideas off the ground smoothly. As the Oracle of Omaha said in the quote at the top of this piece, learning from the mistakes of others is much better!