While we all gather with friends and family this week to celebrate all the things in life we have to be grateful for, here at NTI, we’re also obviously placing a particular focus on our appreciation and gratitude for professional truck drivers across the country and their dedication to delivering everything that makes the holidays so special — including and especially the meals we gather around this week at our Thanksgiving tables.
To that end, we’ve assembled this very quick punch list of ways your fleet can bake gratitude into your driver programs this week and year around to make that gratitude central to the culture at your fleet:
Make driver health and wellness a focus across all departments
Driver health impacts every department and it should be an emphasis of every department, from recruiting and HR to sales and operations, to safety, and even in the C-Suite. Show appreciation for your drivers by actively working alongside them on their health and wellness journeys with the right resources and incentives.
Read more:
5 ways your fleet can focus on driver health as a retention tool
Promote work-life balance
The term work-life balance has become a mainstay in corporate America over the past decade. But for professional drivers who spend days, if not weeks, away from home at a time, that can often be an empty concept. Here are a few resources your fleet can lean on to prioritize drivers’ work-life balance and to make it feel real for them. One key component is paid family leave for when drivers need to navigate important life events without compromising their financial stability.
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Implement policies that support drivers’ work-life balance concerns
Trucking has an opportunity to lead with creative childcare benefits
Ensure schedules and routes are fair and consistent
https://driverwages.com/trucking-fleets-and-creative-childcare-benefits/
Celebrate your drivers
With all channels available and appropriate for you — email newsletters, blog content, text messages, social media, internal communication platforms, driver apps — connect, engage, and communicate with your people to remind them of their value to you and to promote your company as a place where they can thrive and work their entire career. A critical area of that internal marketing is to celebrate and recognize your drivers and their accomplishments and to let them know you appreciate them. Strive to do that every single day of the year with authenticity and passion.
Profess your love and appreciation for drivers every week, all year
Bonus tip! Check out NTI’s We❤️Truckers program. The marketing license for We❤️Truckers is available for free to any NTI subscriber. Contact our team to learn more about how to access the marketing license and use cases for your fleet.
Offer competitive pay & benefits
One of the best and clearest ways to express gratitude for drivers’ hard work is by putting it in the paycheck by providing competitive pay and benefits.
Read more:
Driver pay in late 2023: From per-mile trends to sign-on bonuses, here’s what the data shows
Unlocking the road to driver happiness
Has your fleet mulled freezing driver pay in the current market? Consider these points first
Act swiftly and intentionally on drivers’ concerns
When drivers voice concerns or opinions or something their unhappy about, do your driver managers, terminal managers, dispatchers, etc., hear those concerns and act on them? Or do they see it simply as the driver griping about something? Perhaps both can be true, but make sure the people in your organization overseeing and communicating with drivers on a daily basis can know the difference, and that they escalate drivers’ concerns quickly to the appropriate departments to fix them when necessary.
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Mitigate pay pain points and promote all compensation available
Lead with empathy
Everything in your fleet should be viewed through the drivers’ lens. Not exclusively — and not all decisions should revolve around the driver’s POV. But it should at least be a key consideration for any decisions, programs, policies, etc. For example, conditions and treatment at shippers and receivers, quality of drivers’ experience at truck stops, your fleet’s onboarding experience, driver concerns about their productivity and pay in the current freight market — all of these are critical factors that build frustration and resentment among drivers, and often ultimately lead to their departure from our company and our industry.
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