APRIL 18, 2019 – Is your company struggling with driver turnover? It’s a common problem in the industry today, with many fleets reporting 80-100 percent turnover among their drivers. This creates a constant hiring cycle that is not only time-consuming – it’s expensive.
And although news headlines the past few years will have you believing it’s a universal problem, there is a growing number of carriers that have figured out a way to keep their drivers on board longer. The key, they discovered, isn’t to invest all of their resources into wooing drivers in the pre-hire period with great benefit and compensation packages. Instead, what they’re also doing, is investing time into understanding the experience of their drivers post hire.
A study last year found that the quality of the onboarding process – as well as those first few months of employment – were directly related to the company’s retention rate. In fact, drivers who had a better experience during that post-hire period were 22 percent more likely to stay with the company for at least six months.
In an industry that is grappling with hiring and retention issues, this number is huge. It also indicates that companies have much more control over their turnover rate than they may have realized. The key, is to understand drivers’ pain points, as well as what changes your company could make now, that would benefit your drivers (and your retention rate) the most.
The best way to see how satisfied your current and former drivers are with your company, is to actively collect and monitor post-hire data. This can be done through:
Whether they’re afraid of jeopardizing their employment, or simply looking bad, the information you get from your current employees doesn’t typically represent the full picture. By gathering and evaluating post-hire data using the above sources, however, you’ll get better insight into the core issues that are impacting your morale and retention rates.