Q Carriers President Greg Gorvin sees frequent meetings with the leaders among his owner-operators and drivers as an opportunity to tweak policies in a way to get maximum support or minimum resistance. He also takes the opportunity to teach and reinforce business management skills among owner-operators.
Greg Gorvin has little patience for rumor and misinformation. Indeed, the president of Shakopee, Minn.-based Q Carriers considers drivers’ misunderstandings of carriers’ actions, policies and procedures to be a big cause of turnover.
For Gorvin, communication starts with familiarity. When the company underwent a big growth spurt in the late 1990s, for example, he realized that he was no longer able to recall each name and face. So Gorvin committed himself to memorizing them. The company even created an electronic directory of drivers that included digital photos that dispatchers and other managers could access when communicating with and about drivers.
Despite efforts to get to know drivers, Q Carriers, which operates about 130 mostly owner-operators trucks, struggles with driver retention. The trucking company can’t always match the pay of the big guys. Plus, the rebound in freight has intensified the driver shortage. Turnover “has really turned into a migrane,” Gorvin says.
Considering that Q Carriers faces some recruiting and retention challenges that are largely beyond its control, Gorvin strongly dislikes losing owner-operators needlessly. It bothers him to hear that a driver quit out of anger or frustration – especially when the driver’s reaction is based on a misunderstanding of the company’s position or policies.
“You can’t jump up and down about [an issue] without getting the facts,” Gorvin says.
Recognizing that drivers typically pay more attention to what other drivers say than what a carrier tells them, Gorvin and his managers decided that a key strategy was to maintain regular contact with a core group of drivers and depend on natural communication channels among drivers to spread the word. “Our approach was to reach the leaders,” he says.
