It's a good time to be a truck driver, (until the self-driving trucks take over)

And when I say 'good time' please do accept that as a relative comparison to say burger flipping, making lattes for annoying customers, or working the graveyard shift at the Kwickie Mart.

I caught this really interesting piece on Forbes, DOT's New Curb on Driver Hours Is Hurting Productivity, Truckers Charge, that while seemingly a dull piece about changes in Federal work rules governing working hours for commercial truck drivers that would only be interesting to say actual truck drivers and trucking company operators, actually to me reveals much about the future of work and the automation of work here (and likely everywhere).

First, take a look at the main point of the piece in Forbes, then a take from me on why this matters more generally, (and why robots are involved, naturally).

Rules limiting the number of hours that commercial drivers can be on the road are resulting in a marked drop in productivity, trucking companies claim.

The latest Hours of Service (HOS) rules were put into place on July 1, 2013 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. They state that drivers of commercial motor vehicles can be on the job for a maximum of 11 hours, following 10 consecutive hours off duty. They must take a minimum 30-minute break during the first eight hours of a shift. Their maximum average work week is capped at 70 hours, down from the previous limit of 82 hours.

The trucking industry fiercely opposed the tighter rules during public hearings, but to no avail. Today, a trucking company whose driver exceeds the limit by more than three hours can be fined $11,000 per offense, and the individual driver faces civil penalties of up to $2,750.

During the public comment period, truckers warned that the rules would cut deeply into their productivity. Now, they say, that is precisely what has happened.

Schneider National, one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, predicted back in February of 2011 a productivity drop of between 3% and 4%. Four months after implementation of the HOS rules, Schneider is reporting declines of 3.1% on solo shipments and 4.3% on team shipments.

Pretty straightforward, right?

The Feds tighten up the rules around how long in a day and for a week that commercial truck drivers can be behind the wheel, thus creating an artifical constraint on labor supply, (I am not going to even try to get in to the debate about whether or not this change in rules was needed or makes sense, because I simply do not know), and the trucking companies begin to feel the pinch in lost output and productivity.

The simple solution, and the reason this story was interesting to me, would be for the operators to simply hire more drivers. But it turns out, this would not be an easy solution at all.

From a related Bloomberg piece on the changes in truck driver working hours regulations:

Adding more drivers to payrolls will be a difficult undertaking. The industry was 158,000 drivers short of what it needed to meet demand in the second quarter, according to (trucking industry analyst firm) FTR Associates.

The shortfall probably will widen by the end of this year to 251,000 truckers, the biggest deficit in nine years, and reach a record 338,000 by the end of 2015, according to FTR’s Driver Shortage Surplus gauge. The economic expansion and higher turnover help explain the industry’s labor shortage.

“Every cost gets passed down,” said Sean McNally, a spokesman for the ATA, an Arlington, Virginia-based industry group. “As the labor market tightens and as demand for drivers goes up, typically wages go up as well. The competition is already fierce for good drivers. This is only going to increase that competition.’

An industry and job function that had been already been facing labor shortages, (Mama's don't let your babies grow up to be truck drivers), and now feeling even more of a pinch from a forced reduction in labor capacity (in the name of safety, at least according to the Feds). In the short term, it seems like wages are going to have to rise at least some in order to get more people recruited into becoming commercial truck drivers. Of course the operators, (and their downstream customers), don't like to hear that. Increased wages means lower profits.

But longer term, it seems like while we have read lots and lots over the last two years or so about self-driving cars, the real 'killer' application of the self-driving technology is going to be for commercial trucking.

If the big trucking companies are looking at labor shortfalls that estimates say will increase to over 300,000 in a couple of years, then something is going to have to break. And applying the self-driving technologies to a very real and growing economic problem will provide the necessary incentive to push the development of these technologies into higher gear (apologies for the very unfortunate pun).

It will probably be a pretty good time for the next few years to be an experienced commercial driver. But after that, probably not so much, as automation or self-driving or whatever it ends up being called will eventually put 'truck driver' on the list of careers that end up being displaced by technology.

Which of course will make it even more difficult for the trucking companies to find the human drivers they need today, who will begin to sense their days are numbered from the first moment they get behind the wheel.

Happy motoring.

ODDS: Are you going to be replaced by a robot?

Note: I'm taking one more run down the robot trail today, then I will probably let it go for a while, at least until the robot overlords tell me I need to resurrect the topic again.

Lots of folks, including me, have presented example after example, chart after chart, and anecdote after anecdote all pointing towards a future where more and more jobs that are currently held by people will become automated, roboticized, or rendered unnecessary. But for all the individual examples of this phenomenon, and all the hand-wringing around the issue, I had not ever seen a 'macro' assessment of the topic, i.e., a look at attempting to measure just how many and whay type of jobs are more or less likely vulnerable or susceptible to robot-like automation.

Well a newly released study from researchers at Oxford titled 'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?', attempts to do just that - to place a number, (or a target if you are more cynical), on the number and types of jobs that are more or less likely to be automated away in the coming years. 

The study, a collaboration between Dr Carl Benedikt Frey (Oxford Martin School) and Dr Michael A. Osborne (University of Oxford), found that jobs in transportation, logistics, as well as office and administrative support, are at “high risk” of automation. More surprisingly, occupations within and across the service industry are also highly susceptible to automation, despite recent job growth in this sector.

The entire paper can be found here (PDF), and since it is really long, your humble blogger took the liberty of spending Sunday morning reading it for you and I will share with you a couple of choice excerpts below:

Although the extent of these developments remains to be seen, estimates by MGI (2013) suggests that sophisticated algorithms could substitute for approximately 140 million full-time knowledge workers worldwide. Hence, while technological progress throughout economic history has largely been confined to the mechanisation of manual tasks, requiring physical labour, technological progress in the twenty-first century can be expected to contribute to a wide range of cognitive tasks, which, until now, have largely remained a human domain. Of course, many occupations being affected by these developments are still far from fully computerisable, meaning that the computerisation of some tasks will simply free-up time for human labour to perform other tasks.etheless, the trend is clear: computers increasingly challenge human labour in a wide range of cognitive tasks (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011).

Did you catch that? 140 million knowledge workers, a group that I would expect includes just about everyone reading this post, could be susceptible and threatened by sophisticated algorithms.

And let's not forget about the service and 'lower skilled' occupations as well. Here is more on that front from the paper:

Expanding technological capabilities and declining costs will make entirely new uses for robots possible. Robots will likely continue to take on an increasing set of manual tasks in manufacturing, packing, construction, maintenance, and agriculture. In addition, robots are already performing many simple service tasks such as vacuuming, mopping, lawn mowing, and gutter cleaning – the market for personal and household service robots is growing by about 20 percent annually (MGI, 2013). Meanwhile, commercial service robots are now able to perform more complex tasks in food preparation, health care, commercial cleaning, and elderly care (Robotics-VO, 2013). As robot costs decline and technological capabilities expand, robots can thus be expected to gradually substitute for labour in a wide range of low-wage service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013). This means that many low-wage manual jobs that have been previously protected from computerisation could diminish over time.

Look, it may not be breakthrough or even interesting news at this point that automation continues to advance, and both individual jobs and entire job categories are likely to be eventually transformed or even completely replaced by technology - be it robots or software or a combination of both.

But I still think the size of this transformation, and its impact are still underestimated. If the Oxford researchers are only half right, and instead of their conclusion that 47% of jobs in the USA are likely to be hihgly susceptible to automation in the next 20 years or so, and it works out to be closer to a quarter of all jobs that meet that same fate, it still has deep and profound implications for the economy, for education, and for society.

If you are interested at all in this topic, then I do suggest marking out some time to read the entire paper, it is one of the most fully developed takes on the subject that I have seen.

And I promise to lay off the 'robot' posts for a while!

Have a great week everyone!

Employee of the Week - '75 Stingray Edition

I am not a huge car guy, (some close friends might know that recently I flirted with purchasing a sweet white 2003 Ford Crown Victoria because I thought it would be fun to cruise the freeway and have everyone I approached from behind think I was actually a State Trooper, but I digress), but I found this recent story about the intersection of car culture and employee recognition and rewards pretty fun.

In Michigan, home of the American auto industry, a chimney sweeping and cleaning company named Doctor Flue has put a new spin on the traditional 'Employee of the Week/Month' certificate or plaque on the office wall and replaced it with, get this, use of a 1975 Corvetter Stingray that the selected employee will have use of for the week of their recognition.

Additionally, the Stingray has been fitted with a custom car wrap in the Doctor Flue corporate colors, and has a vanity licence plate that reads 'My Week.' So as the employee of the week rides down the road showing off the '75 'Vette he or she will help spread the corporate message and brand, and also to help promote Doctor Flue as a fun and rewarding place to work. 

I don't want to make too much of this story, I did think it was kind of interesting and fun and that is why I decided to post about it on the blog today. But it does give us another reminder of what should be pretty obvious and apparent but often is not - that many of the time-honored and traditional ways that our organizations try and recognize and reward employees could benefit from a fresh dose of creativity and new thinking.

Getting a mention and a kudo in the company 'all-hands' meeting or having your name etched onto a plaque that hangs on the wall in the corporate lobby is nice. It's even pretty cool. And lots of companies still do those kinds of things.

Cruising down the road for a week in a custom 1975 Corvette Stingray with 'My Week' on the tag is much, much cooler. You'd spend the entire week talking to people about the car, where you work, how you came to get use of the car, etc.  You'd probably be really proud of both where you work and what you specifically accomplished to garner the recognition and reward. No one drives around town waving their 'Employee of the Month' certificate out of the window.

And that is pretty cool.

Happy Wednesday.

Every environment has too much information to process

Most of the folks reading this will probably agree to both of the following statements:

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker.

2. I think I am pretty good at multi-tasking.

Because we pretty much have to be, right?

There is always too much going on, too much work to do, too many family and personal commitments (I bet someone is reading this post right now on their smartphone while 'watching' one of their kids play soccer or in a dance rehearsal), too many things to read, too many social networks that need attention - you get the idea.

And the truth of it is that in just about every situation we encounter (save for any time spent in long-term solitary confinement), we are always juggling, choosing, focusing on some, and trying to eliminate other messages and stimuli in our environment. Think about the simple, everyday act of driving a car for example. You are simultaneously monitoring road conditions, gauges on the car's dash, the weather, traffic signals, other drivers, pedestrians, those idiots on their bicycles that give you dirty looks when they're the ones who are the menace, and more. 

And some of you have become so good at it that you can add applying makeup or carrying on a Twitter chat (not recommended), while behind the wheel.

But I think the driving example is a perfect illustration of how we trick ourselves into thinking we are actually much, much better at multi-tasking that we really are. We get deluded into thinking we are good at it, or we simply accept the fact as a given that we have to be good at it, and continue onward in fruitless quest to be great, (or at least pretty good), at everything at all times.

And now there is new research that suggests that not only are we not as good at multi-tasking as we think we are, that prolonged multi-tasking actually makes us worse at multi-tasking itself - kind of a counter-intuitive spin on 'practice makes perfect.'

Check this excerpt from the Priceonomics blog - a look at some recent Stanford University research into multi-tasking and it's effect on task completion and task juggling.

People generally recognize that multitasking involves a trade-off - we attend to more things but our performance at each suffers. But in their study “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Professors Ophira, Nass, and Wagner of Stanford ask whether chronic multitasking affects your concentration when not explicitly multitasking. In effect, they ask whether multitasking is a trait and not just a state.

To do so, they recruited Stanford students who they identified as either heavy or light “media multitaskers” based on a survey that asked how often they used multiple streams of information (such as texting, YouTube, music, instant messaging, and email) at the same time. They then put them through a series of tests that looked at how they process information.

People generally get better at activities they do often. But that may not be true of multitasking. Since heavy multitaskers often switch between research and emails or Facebook chats and work, we'd expect them to outperform the light multitaskers at switching back and forth between the two tasks. But they actually performed worse as their delta was higher than that of the light multitaskers.

The professors conclude that frequent multitaskers seem to “have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment, [be] less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory, and are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task-switching).” More colloquially, the multitaskers were more easily distracted from a single task and worse at switching between tasks.

Let that sink in - we get worse and worse at multitasking the more we do it.

If the conclusions from this study are at all accurate, then that does not bode too well for those of us that have conditioned ourselves to be constantly hopping from one thing to the next. And technology, it seems to me, isn't really helping in this regard. Rather than trying to exploit technology to make things simpler, more clear-cut, and maybe more efficient, I think most of us are simply using it to consume more, interact more, do more, and attempt to be (virtually) in five places at once.

So let's re-visit the two statements that led off this post and re-word them a little.

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker. (ok that one will probably still be valid for a while)

2. I think I am pretty good terrible at multi-tasking, and the more I do it the worse I get.

What tips or ideas do you have to combat the seemingly overwhelming urge to multi-task?

Red eye flights, skinny jeans, and being tough enough to work here

Disclaimer: It is a total coincidence that I have the second post about Ford Motor Company in as many weeks. I am not on the Ford payroll. In fact, I have a Chevy truck. So there.

Mission statements, culture maps, or an articulation of the 'vision' or purpose of an organization - these are all fairly common in organizations and often mocked or at least ignored. Usually they are either so vague and obvious that they are meaningless - 'We strive to delight our customers every day', or are so specific and drawn-out that they read like marketing brochure copy - 'Our goal is to be the top-rated supplier of industrial fasteners, ties, and aluminum sprockets to the machine, engine, and turbine sub-assembly markets that we compete in around the world.'

So when you come across a mission statement or a list of operating principles that actually doesn't suck, and doesn't take itself too seriously, (I think a pre-requisite for 'not sucking') that are a part of an organization's DNA it is fairly noteworthy or at least interesting.

So the connection back to Ford, (and once more for clarity, I am a Chevy guy), is this piece from Forbes - Are You Manly Enough to Own a Ford Truck?, that provides a glimpse into some of the unique rules/expectations/operating principles that are apparently a part of the makeup of not just people who buy Ford trucks, but as you will see from some of the items on the list, also the people that work at Ford building the trucks.

Here are a few selections from the list - and I'll have some comments after the break:

• Raw meat is acceptable team food.  Raw fish is not.

• Roller luggage is expressly forbidden, except for golf bags.

• Earplugs are not permitted at NASCAR races or National Hot Rod Association events.

• No whining!

• Airport trams and moving sidewalks are off-limits in order to promote team conditioning.

• No wimpy cell phone ring tones.

• Jackets or ponchos are acceptable rain gear. Umbrellas are not.

• True BFT Truck Team members wear real jeans, not skinny jeans.

• For flights departing at 7 a.m. or later, an office appearance is expected prior to departure. Red-eye flights are expected to maximize productivity.

• There are no “travel days.”

A pretty cool list, if not totally serious, but it does go quite a bit further than most standard mission statements or organizational philosophy statements do to better describe the type of people that will actually be likely to succeed, (or at least get along), in the group.

I like the list because it is descriptive, specific, and funny. The kinds of traits that we often find lacking in most corporate-speak that passes for HR and organizational communication. Are these 'real' rules for working on the Ford Trucks team? Are they actually used in hiring and retention discussions?

I don't know for sure, but that doesn't make them less cool, and it doesn't stop any of us from thinking about our version of a similar list of philosophies, expected behaviors, and personality types of the people that we want to work with and that will succeed.

Have a great week everyone!