LOMBARD, Ill. — Attendees at the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers Winter Meeting could be excused on Wednesday if they occasionally thought they had wandered into a job fair.
Attracting and retaining workers was one of the recurring themes of the first day of the two-day meeting. It’s been a huge issue for railroads, of course — at the center of the service problems the rail industry experienced in 2022 — but has significance for shippers, suppliers, and just about everyone else in the supply chain.
Canadian National CEO Tracy Robinson said development of railroad talent has been “one of the top three things I’ve been focused on.
“So we are recruiting aggressively, like most [companies] … but we also want to keep these employees,” Robinson said. “We want to make CN the place to build your career. It means we have to think differently about how we develop people. Railways have a very long history and a strongly embedded culture. We think there’s a different way of growing the next generation of talent. …
“We need to do things differently in the future around working to capture the imagination of the next generation around what we all do here. We power the growth of the North American economy, and that’s a pretty cool thing, right?”
Henry Posner III, chairman of Railroad Development Corp., the parent company of Iowa Interstate and a host of international rail ventures, stressed that such catching the imagination has to come at a young age.
“To recruit people from college is too late,” he said. “You really need to get to people in high school, because when you’re in high school, that’s when you’re deciding where your life is going to go. … We need to find ways of attracting people into the industry earlier. And that could take the form, for example, of encouraging people to volunteer at transportation museums and things like that. Among the volunteers that work on the steam locos on the Iowa Interstate, some of the people who are the emerging leaders are people who started as kids. So the earlier you can involve people, the better.”
Which is not to say Posner — who, among many other interests, is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University — isn’t trying to capture the interest of college students, often through internships.
“You’ll see many of the people who on the Pop Up Metro project [see “Pop Up Metro aims to provide affordable passenger operation,” Trains News Wire, Oct. 1, 2021] are my students, who come on as interns,” said Posner, who teaches “And in some cases, some have gone into the industry. The first year that I taught, one of my students ended up with BNSF as a trainmaster in Fargo, N.D.”
As part of Norfolk Southerns’ effort to retain workers, CEO Alan Shaw said, the railroad has been “purposeful in changing our culture,” an effort sparked by his experience talking to employees during a visit to a specific but unnamed location.
“We brought in some outside help,” Shaw said. “They train our operations supervisors on how to treat each other right, and how to treat our craft colleagues right. And last night, I got an email from a craft employee, from that very same location, talking about how much better it is.
“We have to treat them right, because all of our employees are so valuable.”
It wasn’t just the railroad executives who had the topic in mind.
Glenn Pushis of steelmaker Steel Dynamics devoted a healthy chunk of his talk to hiring and corporate culture, which he says “all starts with the hiring process. … Corporate fit is really hard to define, but everybody knows when it’s missing, don’t you?
“Hire for attitude, train for skills,” he said. “We can teach people how to make steel … we wanted good people with good attitude, strong work ethic.
“And it’s not only who you hire, sometimes it’s who you don’t fire. … [other workers] all know that this person’s not doing their job. And for you not to take care of that problem, what’s that do to you, in their eyes, as a leader?”
Lorie Tekorius, CEO of railcar builder and management firm The Greenbrier Companies, said her company had revamped its recruiting and onboarding processes in the last year to reflect the highly competitive hiring environment. “That should provide a clear path to better retention,” she said. “We’ve also built out a lot of different engagement opportunities with our employees. We’ve started some employee resource groups, and next we’re rolling out a recognition and rewards program.
“We might be a little bit behind on some of these, but I’m really excited that we’re engaging with our workforce, and we’re understanding what we need to do to provide a better working environment.”
It would help to retain employees if those employees didn’t have to work under availability policies that glued your to the job, which is the biggest reason there have been so many resignations at the big orange.
The over-compensated, tone deaf executives would be funny if they weren’t serious. Over the past 40 years – and especially the past decade – they have taken what had been decent, life long blue collar jobs and turned them into a form of servitude. The unions, of course, are complicit in rolling over again and again, granting concessions and ignoring the deteriorating working conditions.
The dogs won’t eat the dog food anymore.
It would help to retain employees if you don’t furlough them at the drop of a hat.
It would also help if an employee with chest pain could go to a medical appointment before he drops dead on the job.