Hiring quality drivers is crucial to improving a fleet’s bottom line, and when your fleet has issues with retention, on-time delivery, or crashes, it’s understandable that you might chalk it up to a poor hire or unsafe driver. It’s easy to forget that while drivers represent the front-line of the supply chain, there are dozens of dispatchers, safety managers, and other in-office staff that make up your fleet.
The often unrecognized truth is that sometimes these issues are the fault of someone other than your drivers. Understanding when this is the case and addressing it accordingly will not only help you reduce accidents, but also help retain your drivers more effectively.
If You Have Problems With On-Time Delivery…
When deliveries aren’t being made on time, fleets often look to their drivers for an explanation, as it is crucial for maintaining a well-regarded brand reputation. But drivers operate under a set of constraints that can’t be ignored. They must:
- Drive to the posted speed limit or your company’s recommended pace
- Navigate traffic that can add hours to a route
- Stop for rest necessary to maintain attentive driving
If you’re having trouble with on-time delivery, you should look into your drivers’ ELD data and see what their average speed is over the course of their routes. If they’re following your fleet’s recommended guidelines and abiding by HOS rules, you should make sure the right drivers are being dispatched from the right terminals. It may be the case that your dispatcher is assigning routes that can’t be met on time.
By improving the routes assigned by your dispatchers, you can avoid unjustly disciplining a driver and potentially making them want to leave your fleet. This also disincentivizes drivers from speeding in order to be on time to meet crushing deadlines.
If You Have Problems With Driver Turnover…
The simple fact of the matter is that drivers don’t want to constantly change fleets. Turnover introduces gaps into their working hours, forces them to adapt to new company policies, and often undergo training they’ve already received. Drivers almost always leave their fleet for a reason, such as:
Lack of communication
40% of drivers cite a lack of communication as a reason they left their fleet.
Problems with their supervisor
Lack of respect and problems with a supervisor combined contribute to over 30% of driver turnover.
No time at home
Larger carriers tackle turnover with more per-mile pay and increased home time
This is just a small sample of the many reasons a driver might voluntarily turnover. If you’re worried drivers might be leaving because of the culture of your fleet, here’s a good rule of thumb: if there’s something you think could be done, your drivers think so too. Make it a priority to fix the issues you see in your fleet and you can significantly reduce driver turnover.
If You Have Problems With Crashes…
Safety managers are right there with drivers on the front-line of crash reduction, so it’s important to equip them with the best technology available. If it’s difficult for them to make informed decisions, backed by the full force of your fleet’s data, then your safety team is being set up to fail. In order to properly prepare your safety managers, you need a driver monitoring solution that:
- Integrates with all the systems you use, so they have access to the full picture of your fleet’s driver data
- Allows them to add and edit driver data without leaving the platform, so they never lose time struggling with disparate systems
- Helps them to assign training targeted to meet each driver’s specific needs
- Enables them to visualize your fleet’s data and understand it intuitively
The Idelic Safety Suite is the only driver monitoring solution that enables all the above. Safety Suite also uses AI-powered predictive analytics to analyze which drivers in your fleet are most at-risk of an accident, allowing your safety managers to find insights no human can identify. If you’d like to see how Safety Suite can be made to work for your fleet, watch a 2-minute demo here.
Download a PDF Version of this blog post:
