Increase Driver Retention with GPS Truck Tracking!

Great talent is often hard to come by in any industry. For shipping companies that need to move goods long-distance via truck, keeping good drivers is critical. Driving a truck cross-country to deliver goods on a tight schedule is much more demanding than most people assume.

According to statistics cited in a Trucks.com article, “In 2014, 38 states issued nearly 395,000 CDLs, up 10 percent from 2013” and that of these new drivers “half leave within the first six months.” This high rate of churn for drivers makes keeping staff incredibly difficult—which means more time and money spent on recruiting, training, and acclimating new drivers.

Also, older drivers are getting ready to leave the industry—as noted in the article, 29.3% of truckers are 45-54 years old, 20.1% are 55-64 years old, and 6.1% are 65+ years old. Assuming that most truckers take their retirement once they hit full retirement age, that means a loss of roughly a quarter of the workforce within the next decade!

Increasing retention of new drivers can massively improve your transportation operations and help you avoid a driver shortage. The question is: how can you increase driver retention?

One surprising method may be to use GPS truck tracking. But first, why do new drivers leave?

Why Are New Drivers Leaving?

Truckers have to deal with strict work schedules, constantly watch out for other motorists, carefully balance their cargo loads, maintain their rigs, find the right fuel stops, and countless other challenges every time they start a delivery run. It’s a high stress job with a high rate of turnover.

The ever-present stress of the job, having to spend days or weeks at a time away from their families, and health issues arising from extended stays in the driver’s seat can all severely affect drivers and make trucking a less-than-attractive career option.

So, how can GPS tracking for trucks help with these issues?

How GPS Truck Tracking Could Help Increase Driver Retention

It may sound odd, but there are a few things that GPS tracking can do which could ultimately help you increase driver retention.

For example, you could use GPS fleet tracking to:

• Regulate Driving Hours. A common complaint of the trucking industry is the sometimes erratic hours that drivers end up working to accommodate their schedules—schedules that may violate Hours of Service regulations and interfere with their sleep needs. GPS tracking devices allow you to monitor time spent on the road so you can enforce Hours of Service regulations and keep drivers on a regular rest schedule. This can reduce stress and prevent some health problems associated with lack of sleep.
• Improve Driver Compensation Models. Pay is a huge issue for truck drivers. On the one hand, paying by the hour can quickly get expensive for the company, especially if drivers milk the clock with unplanned detours and on the clock breaks. On the other hand, paying by the mile alone can have drivers sitting at delivery locations waiting to offload goods—time for which they might not be compensated. With GPS, you can gather the data you need to customize your driver compensation model so that both your business and the driver benefit.
• Making Certain Aspects of the Job Easier. Some tasks, such as finding the right gas station to fuel at for IFTA tax reasons or navigating urban areas with dense traffic can be made easier with GPS tracking systems. With GPS, drivers can quickly find a least-time path to where they need to go and avoid confusion.

The use of GPS to improve driver compensation can prove to be especially effective. As noted in the trucks.com article mentioned earlier, some carriers paid their drivers by the hour rather than by the mile, and “turnover at those carriers averaged 11 percent” compared to the “89 percent” average churn rate recorded by small carriers in the industry.

With GPS to track vehicle hours operated and time spent waiting at delivery locations, carriers can more accurately track how many hours truck drivers are working to improve the fairness of their hourly pay—while avoiding clock-milking.

To be honest, the answer to the looming skilled driver shortage is probably going to take more than just GPS tracking. That being said, carriers in the transportation industry are going to need every advantage they can get to keep hold of enough experienced drivers to handle their workloads in the years to come.

Besides, there are a lot of other benefits to using GPS truck tracking that make it a sensible and worthwhile investment for your business. Learn more today!