The spring features many industry events like TMC 2024, SAE World Congress, and more. Attendees at these events get access to a tremendous amount of information, mostly provided by volunteers. In the case of TMC and SAE, these volunteers work nearly year round to provide updates to critical industry documents like Recommended Practices and Standards.
Freight organizations that exist through volunteers have been challenged, in my experience, over the last decade by a struggle to entice new participants. If you look back at the period prior to World War II, it was these types of industry groups that actually enabled the U.S. to become the arsenal of democracy. Industry organizations were the “go to” people to make miracles happen.
Over the decades, I believe companies and their investors have lost sight of the immense value added by volunteerism in industry groups. In many cases, the focus has become how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of the individual participating for a company. How do you measure the ROI of someone attending an educational conference? How do the bean counters assign profitability to someone participating on a task force?
Most of the organizations I have been involved with usually have a disclaimer that the individuals are not representing their companies, but are lone expert contributors. Who are we fooling? With the exception of retirees giving back to industry, the majority of industry association engagement is done by people working for a company that is paying for their time, travel, and often providing access to information.
Demanding some measurable ROI from someone attending an event is probably a legitimate request from a company accountant. The struggle is that chief engineers and company executives cannot elucidate or enumerate answers for the accountants. There used to be an unwritten rule in some organizations that to get travel approval to attend an industry event, the engineer would have to author an industry paper or give a presentation. That provided, in some small way, a metric allowing at least a start at estimating the cost/benefit ratio of allowing an employee to participate.
I see less and less implementation of this, and more focus on sending managers to events. No doubt there is value in sending managers but often the information gleaned from an event is not adequately related back to the engineers, drivers, technicians, and people who are doing the work.
Often, significant experience is gained by participating over time in task forces at the contributor level. Many organizations have reduced their participation over time for many industry groups, leaving only the seasoned "gray beards" that have been around a long time working in these voluntary capacities. That group is a diminishing asset as they are leaving the industry and heading to retirement.
