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| Pay often changes the amount of pain someone is willing to put up with. |
Just like the reduction of pain often reduces the amount of pay required to find employees . |
Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I often use the term pay to pain ratio. Ratios are important in our daily lives in that you need to have the right amounts of the right ingredients at the right time to end up with the right results.
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| If this old carburetor from my former championship winning dirt track car was not adjusted to the correct fuel air ratio, the results could be disastrous . |
Ratios are important in everything from baking a cake to tuning a race engine. If you don’t have the right ratio of ingredients to bake a cake it won’t turn out well if at all. On a race car, if you get the fuel air ratio incorrect the engine can do everything from perform poorly to literally melt down.
The item that has my attention in regards from pay to pain ratio is our trucking industry. As we all know, a heavy topic in all the transportation magazines is the subject of the driver shortage. There are many different opinions on the subject however there are plenty of able bodied human beings to drive trucks. This is where pay to pain ratio exists. I hear from many college graduates who cannot find a job. It seems to me that when you don’t have a
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| Get the oil mixture wrong on a two stroke engine and its either fowled plugs or scorched cylinders . |
job…any job would seem appealing. For the trucking industry to keep and retain enough drivers, either the ratio of pay or pain or the combination of both needs to be adjusted to solve this issue. You can read one article where it speaks of pay being the only issue and another article speaks of just the pains in our industry. Some examples of pain would be uncompensated time, long hours, unpredictable schedule, infrequent home time and many more. Carriers can pay drivers enough money in order to decrease pain as money will help an individual cope with the pain. This however can lead to the pain ratio becoming unbalanced for the shipper. In this case, they either find another way to move the shipment or find that it’s too costly to ship.
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| It all comes down to what it's worth to the provider and how much the customer is willing to pay. |
There is also the issue of a shortage on truck parking. In this case, it seems as though most areas consider the pain of providing parking space for a semi truck to cost more than the benefit would be to the parking provider. The trucking industry takes the stand that we have a shortage which causes us great pain. Yet, when confronted with the prospect of paying for the needed parking space, the most often sited response is “we’re not willing to pay for it.” This would indicate the pain has not grown high enough for us to pay for such services.
In the end, whether we are running a business or our personal lives, it’s all about having the ratios JUST RIGHT.