Transport and Getting There
Use digital records to locate a process problem, not to make an unsupported judgment about a person. That distinction should be written into any evaluation of website and reflected in who can access the resulting data.
When this issue touches live workplace policy, compare the local evidence with guidance published by OSHA before changing a process or communicating a rule.
A leading cause of first-month attrition, entirely visible at interview, and largely soluble by decisions the operation controls.
Warehouses sit where land is cheap, which is usually where public transport is poor and shifts start before it runs.
What the problem actually is
Shift start times before the first bus.
Shift end times after the last one.
No service at weekends or on bank holidays.
A site entrance a mile from the nearest stop, unlit, with no footway.
And a labour market where a significant proportion of applicants do not have a car.
Which together exclude a large part of the local workforce before any recruitment happens.
How it shows up
As absence, recorded as unreliability.
As lateness, recorded as an attitude problem.
As first-month attrition, recorded as "personal reasons".
And as an under-filled campaign that nobody connects to the bus timetable.
Almost none of it is recorded as what it is, which is why it persists.
Finding out
Ask at interview: how will you get here for a six o'clock start.
Ask leavers and absentees how they travelled.
And plot where your workforce lives against where your applications come from, which shows whether the catchment is geography or transport.
Three questions, and on an out-of-town site they explain more of the attrition figure than anything about the work.
What the operation can change
Shift start times, by fifteen or thirty minutes, to meet an existing service.
Which sounds trivial and opens a whole labour market, and is frequently possible where nobody has checked the timetable against the rota.
A shuttle from the nearest station or town centre, which large sites run and which is cheaper per head than the agency premium it replaces.
A lift-share scheme, organised rather than informal: a board, a group, matching by postcode.
And parking that works, including for bicycles, which on a site with a local workforce is a real mode.
The walk from the gate
A site entrance two hundred metres from the building, unlit, across a lorry route, is a safety matter and a retention one.
Particularly for people finishing at ten at night.
Lighting, a footway and a crossing point are cheap relative to the problem, and they are also the sort of thing that appears in exit conversations as "it didn't feel safe".
Saying it in the advert
State the shift times and mention the transport position honestly.
Where a shuttle exists, that is a recruitment advantage and should be prominent.
Where it does not, saying so filters out people who would have left in week two — which is the same argument as every other honesty question in this collection.
The night and weekend question
Public transport is worst exactly when the premium shifts run.
Which means night and weekend workers are disproportionately car owners, and a site that cannot fill those shifts frequently has a transport problem rather than a rate problem.
Test it: offer a shuttle for one weekend pattern and see whether the fill rate moves before concluding the rate is wrong.
The measure
Attrition and absence by home postcode distance.
Applications by distance, which shows the effective catchment.
Lateness by shift start time.
And the proportion of leavers whose stated reason was travel, which is usually understated and is worth asking about directly rather than waiting for it to be volunteered.
The timetable check
Take your shift start and end times and the local service timetables.
Put them side by side, once.
On most out-of-town sites the mismatch is visible immediately and a fifteen-minute shift adjustment resolves it.
How it fails in practice
Shift times were set without reference to the timetable, the resulting absence is recorded as unreliability, and the campaign under-fills for reasons attributed to the labour market..
The check
Put your shift start and end times next to the local service timetables.
On most out-of-town sites the mismatch is visible immediately.