Training as a Competitive Differentiator

Onboarding and training are most effective when done in real world scenarios, while on the job. When team members are trained in a classroom or at a computer terminal, they will only retain 20% of what they are taught. Whereas those who learn while performing the tasks through repetition will retain 75% of what they are taught. When training retention is critical to the safety of team members and customer property, 20% retention is a major concern.

Outcomes

• Reduction in driver injuries
• Increase in customer satisfaction
• Decrease in insurance claims
• Decrease in time to driver proficiency
• Increase in driver retention

“Because our drivers have access to the right tools, in the field through Acadia, they are more engaged and have fewer accidents.“

– VP EHS

New Capabilities

• Use of training as a sales differentiator
• On-site training and assessment for all drivers
• Faster on-boarding of new employees
• Safety SOP compliance auditing
• Reduction in new hire onboarding time
• Reduction in time to safety compliance for new hires

For one of our transportation clients, the process for training new drivers was rooted in the classroom. Using an LMS and classroom instruction, new team members were trained almost entirely indoors. The company’s leadership knew that if drivers would at least remember their main safety rules, the drivers would operate more safely. Unfortunately, the training efforts didn’t work as expected and driver accidents continued to be an issue.

After adopting Acadia, classroom learning was limited and the LMS was eliminated. Now most training is done in the field. New drivers follow One Best Way procedures when performing all tasks in the shipping yard and onsite managers follow along to ensure all policies are followed accurately.

With the new training method, recently hired drivers began to outperform drivers who had been there longer and been trained on the old system. After retraining the veteran drivers, the company began to see accident rates drastically decline, in some cases by as much as 50%.

Today, the company incorporates data from Acadia into their high-level business intelligence metrics with the understanding that when drivers are trained properly, they will see fewer insurance claims and lower customer turnover. These are the metrics that help our client earn new customers, making their Acadia training program an important market differentiator.