FORTUNE
CDK:B7:G&'!'%%,
THE MAKING
of a
UPS DRIVER
WHEN BIG BROWN FOUND THAT ITS TWENTYSOMETHING DRIVERS WERE FLUNKING
OUT IN DROVES, IT HAD A SERIOUS PROBLEM ON ITS HANDS:
HOW TO TRAIN GENERATION Y FOR A HARD BLUE-COLLAR JOB. THE COMPANY CREATED A WHOLE NEW
APPROACH—AND IT DOESN’T INVOLVE VIDEOGAMES.
By Nadira A. Hira
It’s 9:45 A.M., and at 93 degrees and 1,000% humidity, Saddle Brook, N.J., feels more like the Serengeti
than suburbia. I’m in a doorless truck, wearing high-waisted shorts, facing a day full of handcarts and
heavy boxes. When I arose at 5:45 this morning—an hour I haven’t seen the daytime side of since …
ever—the day had something of the adventurous about it. Like more of my Generation Y peers than
one might expect, I’d never worn a uniform, or even properly nine-to-fived it for that matter, and here
at last was my chance.
UPS would soon fi x me, though. At 8:15, after touring the huge open warehouse of concrete and
conveyor belts that is UPS’s Saddle Brook center, I met Vincent “Vinny” Plateroti, a UPS “driver service provider,” or DSP—
that’s UPS for driver—of 21 years and my escort for the day. At 8:45, we attended the “pre-work communications meeting,” or
PCM—UPS for morning meeting—which included reports from the previous day and a short but detailed lecture on hydration.
At 9, Plateroti walked me to his “package car”—UPS for truck—and performed his daily “Z-scan,” a Z-shaped once-over of
the sides and front of the vehicle, culminating in a good kick to each tire and a signed form for the automotive department
confi rming everything was in order. At 9:08, he demonstrated “three points of contact”—UPS for stepping off the truck—with
a hand holding the handrail, one foot on the package-car step, and one foot on the ground below, to minimize impact on the
ankles. (This would come up approximately 256 more times during the course of my weeks with UPS.) And at 9:10, I got a look
at the “delivery information acquisition device,” or DIAD—UPS for electronic clipboard—which is GPS-enabled, plans drivers’
routes, records all their deliveries, and is said to rival the iPhone in capability. When we pull out of the lot, the huge red numbers
7 > < 7 G DL C
on the UPS-branded outdoor digital clock—which, in the UPS
dictionary, might be under “idol”—read 9:16.
In the half-hour since then, the real job’s begun, and my verve
has, to put it nicely, ended. Wide-open doors are not a pleasant, rugged alternative to air-conditioning, and what UPSers
call “walking at a brisk pace” to deliver packages would induce
wheezing in even the most seasoned city walker. We’ve only delivered to one location, and already I am sweaty, tired, and wondering how exactly I’m going to make it through a whole day of
this torture. And if Plateroti spouts one more abbreviation at me,
well, this might just turn into a different sort of ride-along.
;DGI=DH:D;NDJL=DL6CI to slap me,
not to worry, I’m with you. Barely an hour into
my job safari and I’m acting like a big spoiled
26-year-old baby.
But such is the Gen Y reaction to what one
academic described as a “plum blue-collar job.” (UPS drivers
make an average of $75,000 a year, plus an average of $20,000
in health-care benefits and pension, well above the norm for
comparable positions at other freight carriers.) Much derided
as a group of upstart technophiles of little work ethic and even
less loyalty, Gen Yers aren’t exactly a perfect fit for Big Brown.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a worse match. For decades this
company, which last year had $47.5 billion in revenue, has relied on “human engineering”—strictly timed routines, rote
memorization, even uniform appearance, going so far as to
mandate short hair and outlaw beards—to distinguish itself.
(And just in case you thought they weren’t hip to the times,
there’s even a policy on piercings and tattoos: one stud in each
ear at most for both men and women, and a ban on tattoos visible during deliveries.) Though UPS has adapted over time,
it’s that human aspect that has continued to make the business
successful. Here, you don’t just pick up a package any old way.
You take 15.5 seconds to carry out “selection,” the prescribed
12-step process that starts with parking the vehicle and ends
when you step off the package car, delivery in hand. It’s all laid
out in UPS’s “340 methods”—a detailed manual of rules and
routines that, until now, was taught to UPS’s legions of driver
candidates in two weeks of lectures.
But if there’s one group that isn’t down to be engineered, it’s
Generation Y, people who can’t even be bothered to use punctuation, let alone memorize anything. The inevitable discord
started to show in 2003, when the oldest Gen Yers were in their
mid-20s. UPS senior staffers began to notice a serious decline in
some major performance indicators, among them drivers’ time
to proficiency. Before, trainees had needed an average of 30 days
to become proficient drivers; the younger group was taking 90
to 180 days. Perhaps more disturbing, the number of new drivers quitting the post after 30 to 45 days on the job spiked. That
was cause for serious alarm. Gen Yers make up over 60% of the
company’s part-time loader workforce, from which it draws the
majority of new driver hires. And in the next five years, to keep
the more than 100,000 driving jobs that currently exist fi lled,
the company will need to train up to 25,000 new drivers.
So did UPS bow to demographic pressure and abandon its
340 methods? It did not. Instead, the company is attempting to
change how they’re taught, embarking on a management-train-
BROWN’S BOOT CAMP: UNLOADING
&'"HiZeEgd\gVb
1 package
from a shelf
&*#*
At UPS’s Integrad training center in
Maryland, driver trainees are taught the
“340 methods” at the heart of the company’s
human engineering. Timing is everything.
SECONDS
3 packages
from a shelf
'.#+
1 package
from floor
'*#&
SECONDS
SECONDS
5 packages
from rear door
+*#*
SECONDS
SEE BELOW
+
)
&&
,
.
*
'
&%
DIAD
(
&
Delivery
Information
Acquisition Device ...
just think PDA on
steroids.
ONE PACKAGE FROM A SHELF
&Shift into the lowest gear or park 'Turn the ignition off and engage the parking brake ( Release the seatbelt with your left hand ) Open the
door * Place key on ring finger + Select package without stepping through door (if possible) , Only select packages from selection area
- Close the door . Pick up the DIAD &% Fasten DIAD to clip && Look before stepping into the street &' Hold on to the handrail and exit truck
&'
7 > < 7 G DL C
ing project the likes of which few in corporate America—or
Generation Y, for that matter—have ever seen.
On Sept. 17, UPS opened its first-ever full-service pilot training center, a $34 million, 11,500-square-foot, movie-set-style
facility in Landover, Md., aimed directly at young would-be
drivers and known as Integrad. The facility and curriculum
have been shaped over three years by more than 170 people,
including UPS executives, professors and design students at
Virginia Tech, a team at MIT, forecasters at the Institute for the
Future, and animators at an Indian company called Brainvisa.
Because Stephen Jones—a former driver who heads training
for UPS and is Integrad’s project manager—received a $1.8 million grant from the Department of Labor, much of the project
data, including the research related to safety and generational
differences, will be made public. That information could prove
useful across industries—especially for companies that, lacking
UPS’s almost obsessive penchant for measuring things, may just
be starting to see this new generation’s impact.
>CI=:8DJGH:D;=>H¹A><=Iº eight-hour
day with me, Plateroti made 80 stops to deliver
200 packages and picked up 70 more from 20 locations. That’s one stop every 4.2 minutes, 100
climbs on and off the package car, 100 walks to
and from the buildings, and well over 100 smiling calls of “Hello?
UPS!” (which, incidentally, is not just a courtesy; announcing
your presence in a firm but cheerful voice inspires some urgency
in customers). That’s no small job. And as it’s grown—morphing from a straightforward affair of maps and manual labor into
a knowledge position, complete with high visibility, advanced
technology, and brutal deadlines (the day’s first premium packages must be delivered by 10:30 A.M., and if they aren’t, the DIAD
knows)—drivers have remained at the core of UPS’s business.
Most senior managers at the company have at one time or another
been a UPS driver—including CEO Mike Eskew, who by his own
chuckling admission “wasn’t very good at it.”
Even when upstart Federal Express began aggressively adopting new technology in the 1970s and 1980s, UPS stubbornly stood
by its human engineering strategy, spending years in R&D before
introducing the DIAD. This is a company that’s incredibly stuck
in its ways. But despite being the old man of the industry, the
world’s largest package-delivery company has stayed competitive,
delivering an average of over 15 million packages a day—twice as
many as FedEx. The rivalry with FedEx—which posted $35.2 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2007 and has led in the express-delivery category since it debuted the service in the 1970s—continues
to drive innovation. Since UPS went public in 1999, however, its
stock has been something of a disappointment—rising just 50%
to $75 from an initial offering price of $50. And though it has
struggled with labor issues over the years—it took a 15-day Teamsters union strike in 1997—this September the company reached
a tentative five-year agreement with the union that reportedly will
raise Teamsters’ pay and benefits. The driver job isn’t just lucrative, it’s also sexy—at least according to the Wall Street Journal,
which in 1995 declared, “In the UPS Man, Some Women Find a
Complete Package ... Oh, Those Brown Duds.”
The UPS story began in 1907, when a teenager named Jim
Casey founded the American Messenger Co. as a bicycle mes-
BROWN’S BOOT CAMP: SLIP-AND-FALL SIMULATOR
Gdd`^Z
B^hiV`Z
STRAP ’EM IN ...
LET ’EM FLY
Trainees are fitted with a
harness secured to an
overhead beam.
A few steps in and
trainees encounter
invisible hazards
—simulating
snow, ice, rain, and
sticky floors—that
are meant to trip
them up.
PLATFORM
SLIP-ON SOLES
Foot pads with slippery, hard Teflon cleats
fit over trainees’ shoes to amplify the
falling experience.
tF O R T U N E November 12, 2007
Slips and falls bedevil
first-year drivers. UPS’s
new machine “perturbs”
trainees—safely—so that
their bodies will be on alert.
7 > < 7 G DL C
senger service with his friend Claude Ryan and a $100 loan from
Ryan’s uncle. A merger in 1913 shifted the Seattle company’s focus from messenger services to home delivery, and when Seattle’s
leading department stores became clients, having a brown car
from the renamed Merchants Parcel Delivery pull up to one’s
home became a sign of status. (Brown was chosen for its dirt-disguising properties.) Once the company expanded down the West
Coast, it began offering common-carrier services to the public,
putting it in direct competition with the U.S. Postal Service. To
manage the increased volume, the company introduced its first
conveyor-belt system in 1924. Expansion continued until, in
1975, UPS became the first package-delivery company to serve
the entire continental U.S. In the 1990s the focus turned to new
technology: The DIAD, introduced in 1991, is now in its fourth
generation; UPS’s fleet of jets is the world’s eighth-largest airline;
the company’s “preload assist system,” or PAS, automates its
meticulous loading process.
Casey, the founder, never married, and just two months before
his death in 1983 he attended a UPS board meeting. UPS people
at all levels quote him so often it’s funny. “You can’t be a big
person until you’ve shown competence as a small one,” a staffer
tells me, reciting a line from a pamphlet Casey wrote in 1958
called “Determined Men.” Both DSP Plateroti and CEO Eskew
have noted nonchalantly that in 1956, Casey told UPSers to be
“constructively dissatisfied.” Casey’s words even serve as art in
UPS’s Atlanta headquarters—itself a museum-cum-shrine since
the company moved there in 1991—where a glass wall reads,
“Our horizon is as distant as our mind’s eye wishes it to be.”
The building’s lobby features a brown Model T Ford, a replica
of the original “package car,” so named because when the company began making deliveries, trucks didn’t exist. (Later, when
trucks appeared on the scene, the company kept the packagecar moniker because it didn’t like the sound of “truck driver,”
according to UPS’s archivist.)
“UPS culture is hard to describe,” says Eskew, who recently
announced he’ll be leaving in January, having completed the
five-year tenure that’s become customary for UPS CEOs, and
will be succeeded by CFO Scott Davis. “But when you walk
in here, you can feel it. We all realize we’re part of something
bigger than ourselves, and I think that crosses generations. It
speaks to everybody.”
L=:CHI:E=:C?DC:H7:<6Cexaminingthe problem of training the untrainable Gen
Yers back in 2003, he didn’t have much to go on.
The numbers told him that the company’s existing training program wasn’t working, and the
popular media seemed to be saying that gaming was the answer.
That, Jones thought, was the way this new generation learned,
so he enlisted Francis “Skip” Atkinson, a former professor of
instructional technology at Georgia State University, to do a
full literature review—a step for which there’s usually no time
or money in corporate settings—and conduct focus groups with
UPS employees. “We thought we were going to design a bunch
of videogames,” Jones says. “Then the research came back, and
we did a complete 180.”
What Atkinson’s team uncovered in focus groups with Gen Y
employees was surprising in its simplicity. “To a person, they said
BROWN’S BOOT CAMP: PACKAGE CARS
IgVcheVgZcXn^c:YjXVi^dc
At the Integrad facility, teaching tools include a UPS “package car”
with see-through sides, sensors to measure the forces on trainees’
joints, and videocameras to record their movements as they lift
and lower packages.
STEP OFF
The average driver has
to step off the truck at
least 120 times on a
daily route. That’s a
lot of stress on the
ankles, and
COMPUTER
trainees learn it
first-hand in this
simulator, which
measures and
graphs the force
on the body as they
try proper and
improper exits.
SENSOR
SENSORS
STEP PLATE
PACKAGE SELECTION
“I DIDN’T DO THAT”
Transparent walls on this vehicle allow
trainers and trainees to observe each
other as they practice the intricate
process of selecting packages.
Yes, you did. Let’s go to the tape.
This truck is outfitted with cameras
and a digital recorder to capture
trainees’ posture as they lift and
lower packages.
As an added test, trainers weight the
boxes to simulate a real package-car
environment.
tF O R T U N E November 12, 2007
CAMERAS
FORTUNE GRAPHICS BY MACAULAY CAMPBELL
7 > < 7 G DL C
give me hands-on,” Atkinson says. “They liked the interaction
with the computer, but they didn’t like learning from it necessarily. We found out very quickly that a lot of the studies out there
had been done with a very select audience—college-bound,
usually white, in affluent suburbs, able to afford these electronic
toys—and that had nothing to do with the part-time loaders coming up through the organization at UPS.” But the most profound
problem, according to Atkinson, was the disconnect between
part-timers’ expectations about the driver position and the reality of the job. New hires had so limited an understanding of the
demands of driving for UPS that, once on the road, they were
practically shocked into failure. They needed what would come
to be known among Integrad insiders as “technology-enhanced
hands-on learning.” So UPS enlisted the help of Virginia Tech,
sending two managers to the university for a year and a half to
help design students there turn Atkinson’s recommendations
into a training program.
Situated in an industrial park across the street from the area
UPS center, the Integrad warehouse doesn’t look like much from
the outside. But just inside the door is a sight that’s at once familiar
and surreal: a transparent UPS package car, complete with rows of
(weighted) packages inside. Its incongruous surroundings—close
yellow walls and gray linoleum floor—only underscore its big-toy
appeal. But its purpose is far from silly. Selection is the most fundamental part of a UPS driver’s job, and yet it can seem impossible
when you’re staring into the gaping back door of a package car,
desperately trying to figure out where your five packages are and
how you’re going to get them out in the 65.5 seconds Jim Casey
and his heartless minions have allotted you. It’s a lot to grasp in
a lecture. But being able to watch an instructor demonstrate this
selection process in an actual package car—with the same shelving system, odd-sized packages, and cramped space drivers have
on-road—and getting the chance to try it yourself before your first
trip out could make all the difference.
The same goes for the 340 methods (there are actually many
more than 340 by now, but the name endures). These are so
specific that they include everything from where to get gas—
waiting for a station on the right side of the street reduces idling
time and is safer than turning into oncoming traffic—to which
finger to carry your keys on (hooking them on the ring finger
puts the key in position for your index finger and thumb to turn
it in the ignition and pull it out in one motion). It may seem fussy,
but when Jones, the director, who is less than svelte, pirouettes
through the motions, he is transformed by his muscle memory
into a veritable Fred Astaire.
Down the line, another package car is equipped with force
sensors in its handrail, in its bottom step, and on a large plate
on the ground below. In a job as physical as a UPS driver’s is—
he must be able to “continuously lift and lower packages that
range up to 70 pounds each … while ‘unloading’ at a rate of
800 to 1,300 packages per hour and while ‘loading’ at a rate
of 500 to 800 packages per hour,” says a casual list of essential
job functions—one of the most difficult things to teach young
Supermen is how frail their bodies really are. Grow lax with your
three points of contact and you can be sure you’ll be growing
old—with a hobble and a cane—before your time. And what
better way to show that than with a computer-generated force
diagram? Students take a few hops off the truck with and without
the handrail, and immediately, they can see a representation of
the impact on their bodies.
It’s elaborate, but Jones and his colleagues have come to believe it’s also essential. Because the young people they’re trying
to train aren’t just Generation Y, they’re Generation Why?—a
tribe of disbelievers who’ve learned to question absolutely everything. And they need the obstacle course of Integrad not
because they won’t take notes in a lecture but because without
these demonstrations they may not believe a word of what they
hear. It’s an idea probably best embodied by the lift-and-lower
simulator, a series of cameras in the cab of another package
car arranged to capture trainees’ posture as they lift and lower
packages. These images are saved on a digital video recorder
for later review. “The thing about young people is that they’re
never wrong,” says Jones. “Tell them what they did incorrectly,
and they’ll tell you, ‘I didn’t do that. You saw wrong.’ This way
we’ve got it on tape and they can see it for themselves.”
The final kinetic-learning module—or for non-academicians,
hands-on learning tool—is the crowd-favorite slip-and-fall simulator. UPS incurs significant costs every year from slips and falls,
and it is first-year drivers who succumb the most. Lucky for firstyears then that Thurmon Lockhart, director of the Locomotion
Research Laboratory at Virginia Tech, has devoted his entire
life to the issue. In his studies Lockhart has found that the only
way to help people avoid falling is to “perturb” them—i.e., to put
them through the motions of falling—which causes their bodies to
adjust during subsequent encounters with falling hazards. To that
end, Lockhart’s lab houses a falling machine—a nine-foot-high
metal frame with a body harness attached to it. A subject puts on
the harness and gets comfortable walking back and forth, and then
someone sneaks up behind her and spills soapy water, causing the
subject to slip, scream, and flail around before getting caught by
the harness. It sounds funny—until you wipe out. For the record,
having experienced this first-hand, I was perturbed, and my gait
remains adjusted. “This type of research has been going on since
the 1920s,” Lockhart says, “but UPS is going to be the first to apply
it. And when their guys get out of the program, they’ll almost be
ergonomists. The training is that good.” Now there’s a shiny new
brown version of the simulator at the training center.
There is, of course, also driving done at Integrad. An outdoor
parking lot—called the integration station—has been turned
into a mini-town where trainees can put what they’ve learned
into practice. There are real street and stop signs, a toy house
and toy stores, a UPS dropbox, and even a loading dock, which
was being cemented into the ground during my tour. Trainees
will travel these streets every afternoon, with tasks increasing in
difficulty each day, and facilitators and fellow trainees standing in
as customers to test them on the finer points of customer service.
And while there aren’t any videogames in the Integrad curriculum
per se, there sure are a lot of screens. Students log in to watch
animated demonstrations of tasks, take quizzes on what they’ve
learned, and conduct simulations with special teaching DIADs
connected via Bluetooth. And in true mechanical UPS fashion,
they get … scores! Every piece of data—from a student’s performance on a particular module to comments from his facilitator—is
stored in a new database tool developed by Virginia Tech design
students. It will continue to map trainees’ progress once they
become drivers, and it’s customized for each level of the UPS
hierarchy, so that a region manager can log on for general stats
about his districts’ performance, and a supervisor meeting a new
7 > < 7 G DL C
driver for the first time will already know every single possible
thing there is to know about him.
The pilot program began with 24 students and five facilitators.
Each session runs for five days, for a total of 48 hours, and there
Petersik, a tall older gentleman with a ready smile and firm
handshake. Petersik is set to retire in January, and his last
assignment as the company’s star facilitator is to train the
facilitators at Integrad. The assembled UPSers ask him to
tell me a story, and he
obliges. Long ago, when
“WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THE COMPANY NOW IS THAT OUR TEACHING
he was just a long-haired
hippie preloader, the
STYLE MATCHES YOUR LEARNING STYLES. BUT WE’RE STILL TAKING CARE OF THE
story goes, a stooped,
suited Jim Casey—evCUSTOMER—AT MY WEDDING, HALF THE GUESTS WERE MY CUSTOMERS.
idently on a corporate
visit—walked over to
THAT HASN’T CHANGED IN 100 YEARS.”
the oblivious youngster
and said, “Hi, I’m Jim.
I work for UPS.”
will be nine more sessions this year before the company begins to
“Afterward, everyone came running up to me
tabulate the data. All involved can’t stop stressing that this is only a
asking if I knew who he was, but all he’d said was,
pilot, but if it’s deemed to be a success—which, for the determined
‘I work for UPS.’ And that’s the thing about this
Jones, would mean a 15% reduction in accidents by first-year drivplace,” Petersik says, gesturing at the surrounders and a 20% reduction in injuries for the same group—work will
ings. “It’s a fuse. What’s new about the company
begin on 14 more sites around the country. In the long run, the now is that our teaching style matches your learning styles. But
hope is that young drivers will begin to learn what dispatch super- we’re still taking care of the customer—at my wedding, half the
visor and former DSP Veronica Reisinger calls “the why.” “A lot guests were my customers. That hasn’t changed in 100 years.”
of people outside of the organization don’t fully understand how
But that isn’t the only thing that’s remained the same these
much work it is, how quick we have to be, how much we have to last 100 years. While customers may be at the heart of UPS’s
know,” the 29-year-old says. “I learned my methods, but I just kind business, it’s drivers who are at the heart of UPS itself. And even
of memorized them and could spout them off. I don’t think I fully today they carry the weight of their obligation—abbreviations
understood them until I got on the road. I didn’t get the ‘why.’”
and all—with such effortlessness that it’s easy to believe they’re
just carrying boxes around. But watch closely and those deliver; D G 6 A A I = 6 I 8 6 C 7 : A : 6 G C : 9 f r o m t h e ies become something else entirely—an exhibition of routines so
ha nd s - on a nd te ch nolog y- en ha nc ed , the best plac e precise they never vary, limbs so trained they need no direction,
for Yers to lear n the “ why ” may u lti mately be f rom and words so long remembered, they are like one’s own thoughts.
—horror of horrors—their older baby-boomer and World War It’s something I experienced my first day with UPS, as I did the
II–era teachers. “Yers have a great appreciation of reputation rounds with Plateroti, though I couldn’t have named it yet. And
and expertise,” says Tamara Erickson, president of the Con- I’ve been watching it ever since, each time I pass a package car
cours Institute research firm. “To the extent they can hear from on the road or share an elevator with my UPS driver. “I see you’re
a person who’s done it for 30 years, and hear what worked for wearing your shorts today,” a customer said to Plateroti and me
him or her, they respond to that. And if there’s someone who’s that first afternoon, “keeping cool while you’re running around.”
legendary—a god of drivers, say—even better.”
And Plateroti replied cheerfully, without a moment’s hesitation:
This afternoon’s legend-in-residence at Integrad is Don “Not running. Walking at a brisk pace.” F
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