Stacy Turner heads up all things relative to driver employment at the seven-driver Turner Transport open car hauling fleet based near Atlanta. One of those drivers, her husband and fellow company head Eric Turner, says that as far as retention goes, the fleet has little problem keeping its drivers on board. That’s largely due to something of a holy trinity of best practices that Stacy is quick to boil down in her interviews with driver prospects. She considers all who join to be family.
Want to keep a driver around for a long time? Give him “good equipment, good home time and good money,” says Turner driver Jay Dorris, paraphrasing Stacy’s central message.
Turner’s haulers, with few exceptions, are home at least on the weekends, if not more often. If they’re not, it might be for a special occasion such as the fleet’s recent trip to the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas, where Eric showed his Detroit Series 60-powered 2015 Peterbilt 389 glider in Overdrive’s Pride & Polish National Championship competition.
They brought the entire driver corps with the exception of one hauler who stayed behind to take care of ongoing business. On the weekend prior to GATS, “every last one of us worked both days so we could make it here,” Stacy said at the show in Dallas. “Guess what? No one complained about anything – it’s what we had to do to get the job done. We’re all team players.”
Retention issues are not so simply handled by other small fleets, if Overdrive’s Spring 2016 Operational Survey is any indication. Retention was named by more than six in 10 respondents as one of the biggest issues in employing drivers.
Stacy Turner’s pay, equipment and home-time dictum also rings true for the other three fleets consulted for this story. All have found some measure of success by paying close attention to drivers’ needs.
