But such is the Gen Y reaction to what one academic described as a "plum blue-collar job. 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. 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 Charts , Fortune 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 It's all laid out in UPS's " 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 , when the oldest Gen Yers were in their mids. 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 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. And in the next five years, to keep the more than , driving jobs that currently exist filled, the company will need to train up to 25, new drivers. So did UPS bow to demographic pressure and abandon its 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. The facility and curriculum have been shaped over three years by more than 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. 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.
In the course of his "light" eight-hour day with me, Plateroti made 80 stops to deliver packages and picked up 70 more from 20 locations. That's one stop every 4. 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 A.
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. By Nadira A. Hira , Fortune writer. Daniel Gaddy, 24, makes a delivery to Cyndra Mogayzel in Annapolis.
Gaddy in the back of his 'package car'. 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.
Obviously, it's hard work, and sure, those long hours around the holidays seem like a definite drag, but overall, the rules can't be that strict, right? Guess again. Have you ever wondered why your friendly neighborhood UPS driver is in such a mad rush to drop your package off and speed away like a bat out of hell? It's not them. It's the fact that they're on a crazy schedule, on a crazy route, where they have to follow a seemingly infinite number of rules and tactics referred to by the powers-that-be as the fabled " methods.
UPS has faced a number of problematic lawsuits regarding how far they want to push their workers, and in what ways. Do these rules make sense? Are they too strict? Decide for yourself, but here are some of the requirements that your local UPS driver has to keep in mind every time they climb into their vehicle. If you haven't noticed, facial hair is in. As the s have turned into the s, it's clear that men with beards are here to stay, as they now appear everywhere from corporate boardrooms to your favorite hipster coffee shop.
As the clean-shaven norms of the past have been done away with, most companies have relaxed their draconian rules regarding beards Guess which company that hasn't moved on from their rose-colored vision of the past?
Yep, UPS. According to a spokesperson who spoke to the BBC , "UPS prefers that its drivers, as ambassadors of the company, are clean shaven. On a bigger scale, UPS's beard ban amounts to religious discrimination, as Business Insider reports, since employees who wear beards for religious reasons are pressured to conform to the Ward Cleaver standard. You read that correctly. UPS drivers are not supposed to take left turns , if they can help it, and their routes are actually strictly planned to minimize the necessity of such turns as much as possible.
The reasoning behind this seemingly bizarre rule, as explained by the Independent , is efficiency. When you take a left turn, you have to move through oncoming traffic, which means that even though a left turn might be a shorter distance, it will lead to a longer drive.
UPS boasts that avoiding such turns reduces delays from waiting for traffic to clear, leads to 10 million fewer gallons of fuel being used a year, lowers carbon dioxide emissions, delivers , more packages, and perhaps most importantly, reduces the number of traffic accidents.
Frankly, the figures here are surprisingly convincing — and were tested by Mythbusters , if you're curious — to the point where one could make a decent argument that maybe everybody should avoid these turns, just like UPS drivers do. Now, to be clear, sometimes a UPS driver just has to take a left turn, and there's no getting around it. This doesn't happen too often, though, as UPS claims only about 10 percent of the turns on their maps are left-handed ones.
On the same note, this whole paradigm is reversed for countries with right-hand traffic: it's not about which side you're on, it's about not going against the other cars. Got it? Driving for UPS isn't a simple, easy job. If anything, even the most passionate UPS driver in the world would tell you it's a crazily complex career that requires you to learn the full " methods," as Fortune explains.
That also means, naturally, that UPS driving isn't a job where you just fill out an application, smile big at the manager, watch silly PowerPoint presentations, and receive the keys.
Nah, you basically have to go through UPS bootcamp, as Business Insider points out, or as the big dogs call it, Integrad. Once you've finished some online coursework, you're sent to one of UPS's training facilities, and depending on what position you're gunning for, these hardcore classes last for anywhere from five to nine days.
What do they teach? Hazard avoidance and management, of course. New workers are trained to be the safest drivers on the road. Efficiency rules are etched into everyone's brains. Trainees learn how to load trucks the fastest way possible, and most amusingly, have to run through a "slip-and-fall" course where they learn how to move quickly across ice without falling on their face.
If you're imagining that this particularly course is hilarious to watch Anyhow, the point is, every UPS driver you've met has been through some mad serious training at Integrad, so they definitely know their stuff.
There's probably been a time, at least once in your life, where a UPS driver hurt your feelings. Sure, they smile all big when they first see you, but it can seem insanely rude when this smile is followed by them chucking a package at you from about 20 feet away, leaping back into their truck with a well-practiced twirl, and then slamming on the gas as they race over the horizon. Seriously, are these guys trying to act like the Joker , or what? Don't blame the drivers.
It's not their fault. They're just operating on a ridiculously tight schedule, with an insane number of deliveries ahead of them, and it's been drilled into their heads how much every single second counts. To enforce this doctrine of efficiency, UPS drivers have to be tracked — yes, tracked — throughout every moment of their shift, on the world's most anal timer, or Big Brother will have a problem with it.
UPS trucks are "rolling computers," as NPR points out, and every stop of a driver's day is intensely analyzed by the company, so the higher-ups can figure out how to cut down on extra time, and fit in more deliveries. That's not creepy or anything, right? That's a UPS driver's workday, but on wheels. Okay, so if someone were to first tell you that UPS drivers have to follow strict rules as far as how they climb in and out of their vehicles, you'd probably think it was insane.
Unlike some of UPS's other "methods," though, their requirement for drivers to follow the "three points of contact" routine, as noted by the Chicago Tribune , is actually a good safety measure. What this means in practice, as Fortune outlines, is that when a driver gets in or out of their truck, they should have one hand on the handrail, one foot on the step, and another foot on the ground below — three points, see? Doing this consistently reduces stress on the ankles. Keep in mind, UPS drivers have to do this hundreds upon hundreds of times a day, and using improper posture could do a surprising amount of damage: what might sound like perfectionism gone awry is, in actuality, practical advice.
In general, using the three points of contact is the safest way to enter or exit trucks, as AF Group reports, and the multiple anchor points inherent to this method lowers the impact of injuries caused by slips and falls. Consider: if you have one foot on icy ground, and it slips, your hands on the handrail will catch you, as will your foot on the non-slippery step. UPS drivers operate on some crazy strict time limits, and that means it can be really difficult to find the time to do essential human tasks like According to Thrillist , it's generally recommended for UPS drivers to plan their bathroom breaks, instead of taking them in some impromptu fashion, lest they fall behind: For example, if you've got to load up on gas anyway, that's a great time to take a whiz.
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