Fleet Executives Promote Healthy Habits To Increase the Length of Drivers’ Careers

On a typical day a year ago, Con-way Truckload driver Tim Bellomy — all 304 pounds of him — steered through the Lower 48 puffing cigarettes and sipping soda, his cab vibrating to the beat of Van Halen, The Rolling Stones and country western’s Billy Currington.

Today, Bellomy still rides with Van Halen and the others, but he has not smoked a cigarette since December.

Gone too are 25 pounds, easily shed, he said, by substituting water for the five to eight cans of soda he downed every day.

“I mean, I just feel great,” Bellomy said. “I still cough here and there, but it’s nothing like it was. I could feel my [heart] pacemaker come on . . . and I haven’t felt it in, shoot, I couldn’t tell you the last time I felt it.”

Bellomy’s newfound wellness is the result of the aggressive ap-proach that Con-way and other carriers are taking to driver health and lifestyle.

Transport Topics found carriers building gyms, hiring fitness experts and nutritionists, bombarding drivers with recipes and other wellness tips, pushing fruit and vegetables into their lunch bags and discounting insurance premiums for drivers who adopt healthier habits.

It also is not unusual to find carriers paying for personal health coaches, as Con-way did for Bellomy. He credits the coaching with breaking the unhealthy habits he could not overcome on his own.

“I’m amazed, really,” Bellomy said of his victory over tobacco. “I’ve tried and tried. I’ve been smoking since I was 16. I’m 48 now.”

Although safety and health-care costs originally propelled them to start guarding the health and guiding the lifestyle choices of drivers, carriers said the driver shortage has added new impetus.

In the current driver population, the average age is steadily rising — from 45 to 47 in the past two years alone — according to American Trucking Associations’ latest driver-trend study (7-18, p. 4).

And as reported in the recent Transport Topics Top 100 For-Hire Carriers publication, the trucking industry will need 160,000 to 200,000 new drivers over the next two years, transportation analysts tracking the labor pool estimated (7-18, p. A3).

Carriers said the shortage means they have to do more than recruit new drivers; they have to keep the ones already on the payroll happy and healthy.

“It didn’t take me long when I got into this business to realize the guy with the most drivers wins,” said Kevin McNeil, owner of Fleet Transit Inc., an 80-unit bulk liquid carrier in Baltimore.

In 2006, McNeil built a 1,700-square-foot gym in his terminal and hired an exercise trainer.

“She went out and rode on the truck and saw how the drivers operated and used that to build exercise routines that would help [them],” McNeil said.

Another tank carrier, Greensville Transport Co. in Chesapeake, Va., pays for drivers’ gym memberships, personal trainers and health counseling.

The wellness program started 18 months ago has been so successful in keeping sick days and injuries down — and driver morale and productivity up — that executives are scratching their heads.

“Why didn’t this dawn on us sooner?” said Ted Lepski, Greensville Transport’s president and one of its owners. Wellness “dovetails with our philosophy that the trucking company ought to be about the driver; that if you do not have a driver, you do not have a trucking company,” he said.

The 22-unit fleet also has made lifestyle changes in its terminal, where the kitchen used to offer drivers sugar-filled sodas, chips and candy, Lepski said.

“Well, that all went. Now we put out fresh fruit and vegetables with baggies,” he said. “And the drivers come by and get their vegetables . . . get their fruit and put them in a baggie and carry them on their trips.”

Truck stops, famous for cheeseburgers and steaks and all–you-can-eat buffets, also are adapting to concerns about driver fitness and health.

Snap Fitness, a franchiser of 24-hour fitness centers, announced Aug. 23 that it will locate workout centers in several Pilot Flying J Travel Centers across the country.

TravelCenters of America, which owns the Petro Stopping Centers brand, has opened two dozen workout facilities this year in locations along heavily traveled interstates.

“What we did at about 120 to 130 other locations was create walking or running trail maps,” said Tom Liutkus, TA/Petro’s vice president of marketing and public relations.

After a series of listening sessions with drivers, TA/Petro is making other changes, as well.

“One of the very common comments was, ‘Geez, guys, can you help me live healthier on the road?’ ” Liutkus said.

The travel centers’ menus are offering more healthy food choices and allowing drivers to substitute foods like a green vegetable for mashed potatoes, he said.

And the chain’s travel center stores sport TA/Petro “Stayfit” labels on products such as granola bars instead of candy bars, Liutkus said.

Still, even with help, carriers said keeping an aging driver population well in an industry notorious for unhealthy, stressful lifestyles, is a daunting challenge, given the profile of the driver population.

Angela Fish, director of compensation and benefits at Schneider National Inc., the Green Bay, Wis., carrier that ranks No. 6 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers, put the issue in stark terms.

“Probably not unlike other companies, we have a high incidence of chronic conditions: diabetes, heart disease,” Fish said. “Our average age of health-related [driver] deaths, not traffic related . . . is 53.”

Diabetes and heart disease, along with hypertension, stroke and certain types of cancer, are closely associated with being overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks obesity issues for the nation.

And a 2007 study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association goes even further in putting the weight issue on trucking’s front burner. The study said about 65% of Americans are overweight, with nearly half of them considered obese, but the statistics for longhaul drivers are graver: 86% of longhaul drivers are overweight, and 66% of those overweight are obese, the study said.

The Federal Motor Carrier Administration has said medical studies show a link between obesity and sleep apnea, a possible safety hazard.

Because sleep apnea sufferers often are awakened several times during the night by irregular breathing, they can be fatigued the next day, FMCSA has said.

“Weight has been an issue for a number of years,” said Bert Johnson, senior director of human services for Con-way Truckload, headquartered in Joplin, Mo. The company is a unit of Con-way Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich., which ranks No. 3 on the for-hire TT 100.

“We see these guys come in for orientation classes and for various safety meetings. They’re 300- and 400-pound guys,” Johnson said, “but it’s the lifestyle. . . . They sit in that truck for 10, 11 hours a day. Where they stop to eat, they don’t traditionally have good, healthy food.”

Con-way recently rolled out a new health blog for drivers called Steeringyourhealth.com. The blog features exercise and wellness tips, along with recipes for healthy Mexican crock-pot chicken and zesty slow-cooker barbecue chicken sandwiches that drivers can cook in the crock pots many keep in their trucks, Johnson said.

Carriers need to educate the driving population “that there are much healthier choices and, if they [choose them], along with exercise, they can increase their life expectancy,” Johnson said.

Con-way Truckload has long had exercise equipment in its terminals, Johnson said, but has stepped up wellness initiatives, starting last year with a smoking cessation program in which drivers who quit receive a discount on their health premiums.

Johnson said about 36% of truck drivers smoke, compared with 20% to 25% of the population at large.

“Thirty-three percent of those people who joined the program have quit,” he said.

In June, the carrier started a voluntary weight-management program companywide and immediately filled the 75 available slots, 60 of them with drivers, Johnson said.

Schneider National also offers drivers lower health-care premiums if they end unhealthy habits and offers drivers smoking cessation and weight-loss programs.

In addition, Schneider National has started smaller health and lifestyle initiatives designed to promote a culture of healthful camaraderie, Fish said.

Schneider National posts wellness tips and healthful recipes on its employee website and uses its company newsletter, The Extra Mile, to harness the power of storytelling.

“Who best to share a story than a driver who’s lived it?” said Fish. “They know the challenges out on the road, so when they give us a story about . . . techniques they used to eat healthy on the road, we’ll put that in.”

Fish said Schneider National has fitness centers in its largest terminals and around many of its facilities has created marked walking trails so drivers can exercise.

Schneider National also had one of its third-party health consultants, Atlas Ergonomics of Grand Haven, Mich., publish an exercise book, Driver Road Atlas to Fitness.

The book is filled with exercises drivers can do in the truck, either in the cab or in their sleeper berths.

Like many other large carriers, Schneider is self-insured, Fish said, so it stresses that a healthy workforce means lower employee insurance premiums.

“But what we’re really trying to make sure they understand is . . . if you stay healthy now, you’re not going to have any problem passing that DOT physical, which is going to allow you to continue driving.”

Fleet Transport’s McNeil said that, besides good health care and amenities such as gyms, keeping drivers healthy is also about keeping them happy and feeling appreciated.

“I need people to want to be here,” he said. “So what do I do to attract them?”

One thing he did was build a deck and a barbecue center at the terminal so the firm could hold family events and its monthly “safety burger days.” That day, drivers get a meal along with the monthly safety training session.

“Drivers really are your only revenue-producing asset,” O’Neil said. “Everything else is a dead expense. I am a dead expense.”

Nick Burnezky, a driver who joined Fleet three months ago, said that he has never worked at a place like it.

“I like the gym,” Burnezky said. “It’s actually got quite a bit of equipment there. You can turn the TVs on.”

The new driver said he plans to use the gym often because the downside of returning to truck driving after shoeing horses for the past couple of years is that he is already gaining weight.

Greensville Transport’s Lepski said that he and his partners had some trepidation about launching a wellness program that was going to intrude on their drivers’ lives.

The drivers are being overtly pushed into joining a gym, and the firm eventually may make gym attendance a condition of employment, Lepski said. Drivers also are being asked to undergo exams and health counseling and are being forced, at least at work, into new eating habits.

After they presented the wellness program 18 months ago at a Saturday morning meeting, however, the trucking executives were greeted with a standing ovation from the drivers.

“We actually had one of the larger guys come up to me, and he said, ‘Ted, I think you’ve just saved my life.’ That’s how appreciative these guys are,” Lepski said.