Global Leader in Logistics

This company is a global leader in the logistics industry and specializes in international shipping, courier services, and transportation. Their 400,000 employees help companies expand their business across borders, working with more than 220 countries and territories.

In efforts to improve service for their customers, reduce costs, and, most importantly, create a better work environment for their employees and position themselves as employer of choice, this company partnered with WorkStep to help address turnover and understand the needs of their workforce.

Challenge

The labor market for the supply chain is tight, and being able to compete with other companies for skilled talent that will stay for the long-run is difficult and can be costly. In order for this top logistics company to become an employer of choice, they had to find a way to understand what was driving their employees to leave in order to make impactful improvements to retain their hourly workforce.

This company realized that without real-time insights into what motivates employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction, they would not be able to allocate their resources and money to effective initiatives that would drive positive outcomes.

They also saw the need to reduce cost of turnover. When an employee leaves, the expenses to replace them can be significant, and if turnover rates continue to rise those costs will start having a negative impact on a company’s bottom line.

Solution

Being the world’s leading logistics company, implementing a new program can be a big commitment. With that in mind, WorkStep began our partnership by piloting WorkStep RETAIN at one of the company hubs within the US.

WorkStep’s solution allowed the company to engage with their hourly workers to gather feedback by sending recurring check-ins to their workforce at key milestones.

This helped them identify the top reasons for turnover at the hub. They found career growth opportunities, feedback and manager relationships, and the new hire onboarding process were areas they could make improvements to help boost retention.

Results

WorkStep allowed the company to facilitate hundreds of conversations between their associates and management teams, which enabled them to generate action plans to address their true reasons for turnover.

Check-ins showed that employees who didn’t see future career opportunities were 2x more likely to leave. And those who expressed unfavorable sentiments were 39% more likely to leave than those who had a positive experience at the company.

As a result, the company implemented a few new initiatives:

• Introducing a frontline worker career pathing tool that allowed for more regular career aspiration conversations to take place.
• Developing a “Certified in Management (CIM)” training program with frontline operations leaders to guide them on:
  • How to give proper feedback
  • How to handle disciplinary actions
  • Proper timekeeping practices
• Expanding new hire onboarding/orientation to a week-long program based on feedback that there was a knowledge gap between onboarding and beginning the role.

During this pilot the company was not only able to understand their underlying turnover drivers and take action to address them, they were able to track the effectiveness of their retention strategies/programs in real-time.

Expanded partnership

With turnover being positively impacted, this company has partnered with WorkStep to expand the platform usage to other domestic and international hubs to meet aggressive 3-year retention goals.