Isegoria

Nadira Hira of Fortune looks at the making of a UPS driver — that is, the arduous process of getting a Generation-Y twentysomething to work an arduous job:

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 filled, the company will need to train up to 25,000 new drivers.

Hira quips that “the company created a whole new approach — and it doesn’t involve videogames”:

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-training 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.
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When Stephen Jones began examining the 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 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 first-years 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.

Here’s where that videogame quip seems misplaced:

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 driver for the first time will already know every single possible thing there is to know about him.