Ferrellgas' Logistics Director on earning driver buy-in before the rollout, not after

The decision to invest in a new technology solution is a shared one, but the value only shows up if employees actually adopt it too — and that part isn't automatic. Get that handoff wrong, and the next six months will go to earning adoption instead of capturing the value the technology promised.

At Ferrellgas, where I serve as Director of Logistics, I support routing, forecasting, and driver technology. My career started on the support side, in IT, fielding calls from drivers who needed help getting back on the road. Now that I'm on the management side, I've got both perspectives, and it's left me with a permanent bias toward designing things with drivers, not just deploying things to them. It's how we've rolled out Samsara dash cams, the Driver App, and coaching workflows across our fleet without treating drivers as the last to know.

Here's what I've learned about bringing drivers into a rollout instead of just informing them about it.

1. Pilot before you roll out company-wide

Whenever there's a business need for new technology, we start by mapping the impact everywhere it'll land—the driver seat, dispatch, and management—and documenting what we expect the change to look like. But that documentation is always a first draft. We run a small pilot before anything goes company-wide, and every question a driver asks tells us something our documentation missed. By the time we get to general release, those gaps are closed because the drivers using it every day already found them for us. Run your own small pilot before anything goes company-wide, and treat every question a pilot user asks as a gap in your plan, not a distraction from it.

2. Show drivers the technology is on their side

When we rolled out dash cams, we didn't start with our driver population. We installed the cameras in our regional safety managers' vehicles first, so they experienced the alerts themselves before asking anyone else to. That gave them real credibility when they talked to drivers about it, because they experienced it firsthand before asking anyone else to. 

But what really shifted driver sentiment was watching the cameras protect one of their own. One of our drivers was sideswiped on the highway in the rain by a car that took off without stopping. He knew to hit the dash cam button to flag the footage, and that recording gave us clear proof the accident wasn't his fault. Before, that same incident would have just been an unexplained scratch on the truck. Stories like that travel fast among drivers, and they turn technology into something drivers see as being on their side. If you want your own rollout to earn that same trust, look for the moment the technology protects someone, and make sure that story gets told.

3. Roll out incrementally, and tune as you go

We didn't turn on 20 different alerts at once. We picked a handful to start, set the thresholds intentionally so the experience wasn't overwhelming, and phased in things like Safety Score visibility so it would be consistent across the whole fleet once everyone had the same equipment. Moving fast matters but moving fast in a way that overwhelms people isn't actually fast. It just costs you the trust you need for the next change.

4. Recruit change champions your drivers already trust

Our managers help us identify drivers who are naturally adaptive to change, often the same drivers who already train their peers informally. We bring them into the pilot early and ask for intentional feedback, not just "this doesn't work," but "here's how to make it better." Once we're ready for a full rollout, those same drivers become our best advocates, because a driver hearing about a change from another driver lands very differently than the same message coming from a manager. Find those people on your own team before your next rollout and let them carry the message. It'll travel further than anything coming from you.

5. Let driver feedback shape the design, not just validate it

When we piloted our newest DVIR, drivers told us exactly what details they needed to see in the form to do the job right, the kind of detail you'd only know by actually doing the inspection every day. We took that feedback back to our Samsara team, and it shaped the version we ultimately rolled out fleet-wide. A Driver App redesign worked the same way: drivers told us how visible a key button needed to be in their daily flow, since it triggers their end-of-day process, and that shaped the final design. We never would have caught either detail without asking the people actually doing the job. Driver feedback isn't a box to check on your way to launch. It's a design input that should be shaping the final product itself.

Interested in learning more about earning driver buy-in before the rollout? Listen to Raudel’s full conversation on Operator Grade, a Samsara podcast, where he goes deeper on bringing drivers into every stage of the rollout. Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify → | Apple →

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