Prioritize Your Truck Drivers and Watch Your Business Thrive
When you think about your business’s assets, what comes to mind?
Clearly, your high-value equipment and reputation are key, but your actual most important business asset is your people.
Your business priorities should reflect that. However, this isn’t just a nice gesture—it’s a strategic one. Prioritizing your truck drivers can truly help your business soar.
Here’s why.
The True Value Your Truck Drivers Provide to Your Company
First, let’s talk about how truck drivers benefit your company (and society as a whole):
- Truckers deliver critical goods to every store, warehouse, and facility in the country. Without truck drivers, grocery stores would have empty shelves, hospitals would run out of supplies, and communities would collapse. This sounds dramatic, but it’s a fact.
- Truckers connect businesses. More than performing the necessary transfer of goods, truck drivers themselves forge invaluable relationships with business owners, community members, and companies across the country.
- Truckers empower the American workforce. Not only do truck drivers make up a healthy fraction of American workers—nearly 6 percent!—but the work truck drivers do enables other workers to get their jobs done. Because trucking helps keep our economy moving along, everyone enjoys the benefits of the hard work of truck drivers.
Amid that clear value, companies are experiencing a problem. There’s a labor shortage. Truck driver strikes abound. As a result, all of these benefits are possibly threatened.
How can we go about resolving these issues?
Staying Competitive: How Companies Can Increase Truck Driver Retention
Here, we’ll talk about how you can make it possible for your employees to enjoy their trucking experience.
The first step is simple: Take the time (and use the tools necessary) to learn about how your drivers are performing and how they spend their on-the-clock hours.
This isn’t invasive—it’s responsible management. With the data you collect, you can then implement some initiatives:
Consider ways to attract or support new or underrepresented talent demographics.
For example, you may be able to pave the way for female truck drivers or truck drivers with children to work for you by implementing programs geared to assist working parents. Another option? You could recruit younger truck drivers through educational initiatives such as a course on how to become a truck driver or a truck driver academy.
Recognize great truck driver performance.
If you know that your drivers are respecting speed limits and taking great care of your vehicles, they’re helping your business by extending the value of your fleet. Once you realize this through dash cam footage or tracking software, you can provide incentives to help reinforce outstanding performance. You can even gamify the process. Have your truck drivers compete to see whose GPS tracker reports the best safety statistics!
Streamline the efficiency of your fleet so you can offer increased perks.
GPS tracking empowers you to figure out where you can make small adjustments to your operations—more efficient routes, for example—that allow you to take on more gigs and increase profitability. If you do that, you can prioritize your truck drivers through perks such as competitive salaries, benefits, or increased paid time off. Then, they’ll be more interested in continuing to perform well, making it easier for you to grow your business and continue to offer your drivers great benefits.
How Prioritizing Truck Drivers Can Boost Your Business
What goes around comes around! Benefiting your employees in this way will help improve the way your company works (and the benefits you see).
Here’s a quick rundown showing the exact business boosts you may be able to expect:
- Truck drivers who feel valued and have the time and resources to focus on excellent performance drive safer. This results in a better reputation for your brand and lower insurance premiums.
- Truck drivers who drive safer and more efficiently may help you take on new gigs, resulting in more profitability and perks.
- With great truck drivers on staff who are set to stay on staff, you can worry less about understaffing and labor shortage.
- Because you’ll be able to take advantage of improved hiring retention due to GPS tracking and the adjustments you will make, you’ll save money. Onboarding new employees is always more expensive than retaining existing ones!
Invest in GPS Tracking to Improve Your Truck Drivers’ Experiences
Many business owners wonder whether opting for GPS tracking will make it seem like they don’t trust their employees. The truth is that GPS tracking can be used to better understand your fleet, find ways to boost your bottom line, and improve working experiences for every truck driver on your team.
From gamification strategies to being able to have your employees’ backs during billing disputes, GPS tracking can truly help you prioritize your truck drivers. As a result, your business will thrive.
At ClearPathGPS, we’re ready to partner with you to get the data you uniquely need, and then use that data in the most powerful way possible.
Ready to learn more? Connect with our friendly team today, and, in the meantime, download our free e-book, Choosing ClearPathGPS as Your Fleet Management Solution Provider, to learn more about how to select a top-tier fleet management provider.
