Transportation Organization Boosts Engagement 20% with Focus on Communication

Background

This transportation organization is made up of both driver and non-driver employees. Over the years they have gained a reputation for being a great place to work and drive for. They have made TCA’s ‘Best Fleets to Drive For’ top 20 list for ten consecutive years and entered the ‘Best Fleets to Drive For’ Hall of Fame in 2022. They partnered with People Element just before the start of the pandemic after coming off another survey provider who wasn’t delivering the level of insights that they were looking for. From the start, they understood the importance of employee feedback and wanted a tool that would support them in empowering their people to share their thoughts, opinions, and honest feedback with leadership.

Challenge

The organization suspected that there was work to be done around employee voice, which encompasses the degree to which employees feel that they have a space to freely express or communicate their thoughts and opinions with their workplace. After deploying an engagement survey to all their employees in 2019, the data confirmed that employee voice and communication were opportunity areas for the company to focus their efforts on. Making a positive impact in these areas was more important than ever as the organization navigated obstacles presented by COVID-19 and they worked to support and maintain employee engagement levels.

Solution

Driver Facebook Group

The organization started their efforts by focusing primarily on their Driver population since being on the road makes communication more difficult for them. They launched a Driver Facebook page which quickly became the go-to spot for company conversations. The casual nature of the Facebook page proved to be a safe space for their drivers to freely share thoughts and suggestions.

The leadership team used this tool to interact with their teams on a more personal level and were able to connect with them more than ever. Each week they would take a handful of employee suggestions into their meetings to discuss and make sure they were being addressed. A big piece of the success with the Facebook group was that they always made it a point to follow up with the drivers who posted the suggestions and communicate their next steps.

The organization shares that this initiative was not only helpful for communication, but the public forum nature of Facebook was a great way to hold themselves accountable for closing the feedback loop with their team.

Storyboard Podcast Platform

After noting the success of the Facebook page, the organization decided to deploy another communication tool called Storyboard. Storyboard is an internal podcast platform that they leveraged as a means for two-way communication with both driver and non-driver populations. In an effort to keep the workforce connected, condensed versions of meetings were posted to Storyboard so employees who weren’t able to attend could watch and interact with them there. This tool had a great adoption rate with over 95% of the total fleet being active users and about 80% having watched all content posted.

Results

It is evident that the actions they took to improve employee voice and communication made an impact across the organization. After running their initial engagement survey in 2019 and focusing on their opportunity areas, they saw a positive increase in favorability ratings in almost all sections of the survey. Most notably, they saw the percentage of favorable responses increase by:

15 points in Leadership,
13 points in Fleet Management, and
8 points in Communication

Along with these categorical increases, they noted a significant jump in overall Favorability and Engagement among their Non-Driver populations.

Engagement refers to the percentage of the population that is engaged based on People Element’s Engagement Index.
Favorability refers to the percentage of favorable survey responses.

Despite the obstacles that were presented throughout the peak of the pandemic, this organization was able to lean on insights from their people and continue to make positive impacts for their workforce and incremental improvements to their engagement.