S1 E40 Why Trucking Employees Ignore Your Processes (It’s Not What You Think)

Most trucking company owners think process problems are people problems.

They’re not.

In this episode of Driven for Success, Mike Ritzema breaks down the hidden reason processes stop working as trucking companies grow.

Because most of the time…

your team is not resisting the system.

They’re adapting to reality faster than the system is.

You’ll learn:

•  Why employees create “shadow systems” 
•  The real reason shortcuts happen 
•  Why forcing compliance can make operations worse 
•  How to spot friction hiding inside your workflow 
•  What great processes actually look like in real trucking companies 

If you’ve ever said:
 “Why can’t people just follow the process?”

This episode is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

If your team keeps ignoring your processes, it's probably not a discipline problem. It's a design problem. And most owners never figure that out. Welcome back to Driven for Success, the podcast focused on helping trucking companies build better businesses, lead better teams, and keep drivers. Help them scale without everything depending just on them. I'm your host, Mike Ritzma, the founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is to help trucking families. This podcast is part of how we fulfill that mission for the people. Today I want to talk about something that frustrates almost every owner. Once you get past that 15, 20, or 30 truck mark, you create processes and you explain the processes and you believe that you're clear and you document those processes. And then nobody follows it. Your reaction is my team just doesn't follow processes. But most of the time, that's not actually the problem. The real problem is your process doesn't match reality anymore. You know, it's easy to assume that a process that's not being followed means your employees are bad. It's also easy to label it as they just don't care. Or they're just being lazy. They just don't want to do the work. Those are so easy to do. I know I've done it before, and I think that almost everybody does. But it there's other options, you know. One of them is that your process is just outdated. You know, it just isn't what happens. Uh, it also only works when everything else is going fine. So in a state of calm, this process is no problem. But there are times when there's chaos, which in trucking is a lot of the time. It's not calm. And so we have to get things done, and the process may prevent that. It also may be built by somebody who's not doing the job anymore, or built for someone not doing the job anymore. Rules change in trucking companies all the time. And so these new processes may not match who's doing which job. It also can add tremendous amounts of friction to the work they're trying to get done. The process gets in the way of doing the work. I mean, the thing to remember really is that employees adapt to the reality faster than management does, and those processes are done by the employees. Here's the thing that nobody wants to admit your team is constantly stress testing in your systems. They're always seeing what works and what doesn't. And it's not because they're trying to be rebellious, it's because they're trying to survive the work. And there are times when the process slows them down and creates confusion or doesn't work anymore in the real-world version of the job. And what happens then is people quietly create their own version of the process and they always do it. And it's not because they hate the structure that you provided, it's because they hate the friction that comes along with it. You know, some examples would be things like dispatch having to enter the same info twice, like once into the dispatch system and once into another system. Or payroll skipping steps because the right way just takes too long. It's too hard to get approval for the detention that they know the manager is going to approve, even though the process says they have to get it approved. You know, a great one is the driver is just texting information to the office instead of using whatever portal they're supposed to use to transmit that information. And then the employees that receive the information, you know, usually the billing people, just fix it for them. I see this one all the time. Well, they go, it's just easier for us to do it. Well, is it? And that's a discussion that needs to be had. You know, or you know, people tracking things, especially like safety and compliance, tracking things on side spreadsheets instead of using the main system. And these systems, these shadow systems, because they are systems that these people are using, they're not accidents. They're solutions to trying to get the job done. One of the biggest mistakes owners make is confusing, people aren't following the process with the process is failing the people. That's a completely different problem. Because if your process only works in the ideal calm conditions, you don't have a process. You have a theory. I mean, trucking is messy. So if you divide if you design your process so that it works when everything, I like to say it goes according to Hoyle. You know, when all there's all everything goes like it's supposed to go, then this process works just fine. That's not a process. It doesn't work that way because trucking is so crazy all the time. We all know it. Um, some people probably even laugh when I talk about having processes because they're like, how can you have a process? It's chaos all the time. Uh, you can, by the way. Uh you know, the phone's ringing all the time with random things that require immediate attention. Um, schedules keep changing. There's customer emergencies, and that's those just happen all the time, as we know. Or we get incomplete information or late information, or someone's not accessible. You know, all these things happen all the time. Uh, a lot of people that provide help to businesses will tell you to separate the urgent from the important. In trucking, almost everything seems urgent. And it's really hard to separate the urgent from the important because, again, your phone does not stop ringing. Urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent. So, you know, this is this is where this, you know, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, is that we have to be able to make processes that can survive these things. Because good systems survive chaos, but bad systems require control. And control is where owners make accidentally make things worse. Because instead of investigating why the process broke or why the process isn't being used, they just enforce it harder. More meetings, more reminders, more accountability conversations, more frustration, more pounding on desks, saying we must do this process. But forcing people to follow a broken process doesn't fix the business. It just burns people out faster. And owners think if I could just get my people to be more disciplined, that's not it. If smart, experienced people consistently work around a process, you should investigate the process, not the people. You know, people don't wake up saying, oh, I'm gonna not do my job today. I'm not gonna follow the process. Most people, almost everybody that I've met, they want clarity and consistency. They want to know exactly what to expect and exactly what you expect. And these workarounds, they're data to show you where the process is failing. It's not defiance. And repeated shortcuts, repeated sidesteps of the process reveal friction points. They absolutely, you know, it's absolutely true. We've had it happen here where early on in the business, uh, we had some processes. There were only like three of us here at the time. This is a long time ago. And one of my people who was really good would just work around what we had done and she would get the right output. So there wasn't a problem that way. So it wasn't something I saw right away. But then she'd go on vacation and I'd pick up her work. And every time she came back, everything was all twisted around because I wasn't aware the processes were even broken as the owner. And so that can happen for you too. And just be mindful of that. Because the unofficial process is often the real process already. And here's one of the best ways you can discover this, and one of the best things you can do as an owner is go watch the actual work happen. Something I didn't do right away. Not the meeting version, not the SOP version, not the theoretical version, like you read about as much as you'd have a textbook, right? Like the textbook management things, nothing like that. Go watch the real deal. Sit with this man. Sit with payroll, sit with safety while they're doing these things. And watch where they hesitate, where they skip steps, where they create their own shortcuts. And that's where your process problems actually show up. They're not going to reveal themselves in the conference room. They're going to be there on the floor of the business. You know, it's easy as an owner, if you started with a small number of trucks and you've been growing, you're probably not as involved in the day-to-day as you once were, which is good because there's only so much day-to-day you can do, and your time is spent being strategic, trying to build the business, things like that. And so the processes can easily be built by the way you used to do it. You know, when you had five trucks and you were the only dispatcher, how you did it worked fine for five trucks, but now you've got 30 trucks. And that calculation all changes. There's a lot more moving parts. And so the processes that you built for five trucks may not work with 30. You know, it's your frontline people, it's your dispatchers, your office people, your shop, your safety people. They see this friction long before it ever gets near you. And I would encourage you to take a big drink of humility while you do this. Uh it's actually good for you. And what I mean by good for you is the people doing the work are gonna help you if you let them. Just let them help you. Let them tell you where the process is wrong. Let them make suggestions on how to improve the process because you really want the outcome. The process was built to make an outcome. And so you want that outcome, and they probably have really good ideas on how to get there. So your team may not be resisting structure, they're just compensating for bad structure. Every trucking company hits a point where just work harder stops working. And that's when systems really matter. But systems only help if they reflect reality, not theory, not wishful thinking, not how the business used to run 15 years ago. Reality now. Because the best process is not the most detailed process, it's the process your team can execute consistently under pressure. And if your people keep working around your systems, don't just ask, why don't they follow this? Ask, what is this process making harder than it should be? That question will take you a lot further in getting this figured out. Thanks for listening to Driven for Success. If this episode made you think about where friction is hiding in your business, send it to another trucking company owner who needs to hear it. And I'll see you next time.