Trucking Company Compensation

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Experience Matters

Developing compensation plans for trucking companies requires a rock solid understanding of freight movement through the United States. It also requires experience with the multitude of freight companies that exist. Prosperio Group has both. With hundreds of different trucking companies under our belt, we have designed plans for just about every possible role within a given trucking company. From sales and recruiting to maintenance and safety, and of course drivers, we have seen it all!

Our experience has taught us the nuances between a for-hire truckload carrier (OTR) and an LTL carrier working with regions and relays across the country; we have worked with both shuttle and line haul drivers, and private fleet operations.  We have designed for temp controlled carriers, as well as highly specialized carriers who only use flat bed.  While there may be other firms that have worked on major carrier sales comp plans, no one has worked with as many trucking companies for as many different roles.

Weekly Piece Rate Plans

There are a couple of very prominent trucking companies that use variable pay (one uses weekly piece rate incentives for nearly everyone in the company). While we can certainly help you put this kind of plan in place, we would also work to ensure that this approach is right for your company. It may be, or it may not be.  A compensation strategy must match a company’s culture, ethos, and technological capabilities. Weekly piece rate plans require decentralized management and strong technological skills distributed throughout the organization (or at least good Excel skills). It also requires a bit less concern and focus on “market competitive pay levels” as these plans can pay significantly more or less than prevailing market wages (and they often do). 

Private Fleets & Too Many Pay Codes

We can simplify your driver compensation plan while ensuring you are staying competitive with market rates. We have revised many private fleet plans – vastly improving driver retention and efficiency. This does not HAVE to involve an hourly pay discussion, though in some cases it may end up going there (if you have drivers in CA for example, it’s pretty hard to avoid). We consider all different approaches – miles, stops, pieces, and hours (or not) along with various performance factors. When all is said and done, about 25 pay codes could be eliminated from your system by having an hourly wage as part of the driver pay plan. 

THE BENEFITS

This removes accounting for detention, meetings, testing, training, roadside inspections, and countless other individual events as separate pay codes in your system. It also helps drivers feel more comfortable with detention or delay time; under other incentives they are not getting paid for that work (unless you have a separate pay code for it). At a recent trucking industry meeting of OTR carriers (for whom hourly pay has been disliked for decades), they mentioned that the rise of ELDs has made them much less concerned about drivers to “milking the clock” as they simply will not be able to get away with it anymore. This means hourly pay (or some kind of guaranteed minimum pay, or even “salary”) may not be that far off on the horizon any longer. Give us a shout, and we can help you sort it out!

LTL Companies 

Is your sales compensation plan working for you, or are you working for it? This is the highest priority for LTL companies, followed closely by terminal operations. Get your compensation plans right first and other pieces will start to fall into place.

Truckload Carriers 

We recommend starting with recruiting, orientation, safety, driver managers, and load planners. Make sure that everyone that deals with drivers on a day to day basis is encouraged to keep them busy AND happy. With driver turnover close to triple digits and the end to the driver shortage nowhere in sight – you must start here and then consider other roles in the organization afterwards.

We Have Your Back

If your organization is willing to face your compensation challenges, then we can certainly ensure that you are investing in the best results that you can get from your staff. If you are more traditional and favor a more centralized and market-controlled plan, then we can work with you to benchmark pay levels to the market; we would then prioritize the roles you should work on first, and then ensure you are prioritizing the right metrics to maximize the ROI on your compensation structure. 

This is not an easy process; even for medium sized companies, working through incentive design can take months. We will be with you from the beginning to the end, making sure everyone on the design team(s) stays on task and completes the work according to the desired timeline. We also handle all the heavy lifting of the economic modeling and can even help put in place sophisticated Excel tools to calculate incentives, manage your costs, and analyze the return you are getting for what you are spending.

EXPRESS PROJECT 

When your needs span several roles, but you have only a few people, our Express Project is your best bet. We’ll spend time with you and your senior leaders understanding your business and working alongside you to develop the plans as quickly as possible. We’ve successfully executed hundreds engagements for small to medium-sized organizations just like yours (typically 5 to 50 employees). 

An Express Incentive Project includes: 
• Strategy and structure assessment  
• Compensation design for up to 5 roles 
• Includes salary bands and incentives 
• Market benchmarking of pay levels for those roles 
• Plan documentation 
• Pro-forma economic modeling (minimal historical testing) 
• Roll-out guidance 
• Development of an incentive calculator via Excel
• Additional automation possible
• 3 months of post-project support 
• Project turnaround is approximately 4-6 weeks

1P1P PROJECT: ONE PERSON, ONE PLAN 

A 1P1P Project is great for start-ups and small companies! It is our smallest project size, but this makes it ideal for those who need a single plan immediately.  

The 1P1P Project includes: 
• All plan design details 
• Basic market pricing 
• Economic testing 
• Incentive plan documentation 
• Outlining of goals and expectations 
• Assessment of business goals and… 
• Assessment of impact of this role on those goals 
• Role clarification 
• Development of an incentive calculator via Excel
• Additional automation possible
• 3 months of post-project support 
• Project turnaround is approximately 2-3 weeks 

FULL-SERVICE COMPENSATION PROJECT 

When you need to clarify your business objectives, streamline your organization structure, improve employee accountabilities, AND want to develop plans for several interconnected roles, a Full-Service Compensation Project does it all! This project features multiple virtual meetings with our developers and your design team and is often selected by medium-sized to larger companies, as well as small companies undergoing major transformations. 

A Full Service Compensation Project includes: 
• Business goal clarification 
• Incentive compensation plan design for all roles in scope
• Salary bands suitable for job postings 
• Development of career levels for highly populated roles 
• Employee change management 
• Extensive pro-forma and historical economic modeling 
• Goal-setting sharpening 
• Market benchmarking of pay levels for all roles in scope 
• Roll-out support and guidance 
• Organization redesign and role change/definition 
• 12 months post-project support  
• Detailed and automated Excel calculator
• Additional automation possible
• Possible introduction to one of our EIM vendor partners 
• With integration assistance into their platform 
• Turnaround time is at least 90 days 
• May vary depending on size and magnitude of change