How to Improve Driver Performance through Targeted Training

“If you don’t have your house in order, they’re going to come after you. It all depends on prevention and what safety practices you have within your companies.”

This statement, made by Mehdi Arradizadeh, vice president of safety and risk management for Anderson Trucking Service in a recent HDT article on how fleets can address nuclear verdicts, hits the nail square on the head.

The threat of a nuclear verdict and the increasing cost of insurance has a lot of carriers asking themselves serious questions about the ways they operate. To address the gaps they see in consistency and support for their drivers, many are turning to technology to put additional safety measures in place, including driver assistance technologies, truck simulators, and in-cab cameras.

The safest and smartest bet in creating a culture of safety is to formulate a multi-layer approach – one that consists of several solutions that integrate together tightly. As the military maxim goes, “two is one, one is none,” meaning applying one solution to a problem – especially one of this magnitude – is essentially the same as doing nothing at all.

Inserting targeted training at key points in an employee’s lifecycle (pre- and post- hire) is an obvious expectation of employers across all industries. Building a strategy and introducing policies around training in the trucking industry will inevitably lead to performance boosts, higher CSA scores, a more complete driver knowledge base, and higher experience levels across your force. These in turn result in fewer accidents, lower risk, and will play favorably in the mind of a jury if there is a lawsuit after an accident.

Training at All Stages in the Driver Lifecycle

Three key points exist in the lifecycle of a driver: recruiting, onboarding, and safety (or post-hire). For each of these stages, or touchpoints, carriers benefit from delivering a unique set of training components to a driver.

Make a Solid First Impression – Pre-hire Engagement in Recruiting

For example, after a candidate applies, sending training videos in the recruiting stage of a driver’s lifecycle serves two purposes. First, it keeps drivers engaged in your process because it shows them you’re interested. It also tells them your organization takes an active interest in educating their drivers. Carriers make a positive impression almost immediately this way, which leads to fewer drivers “ghosting” you.

Our Driver Engagement service makes it easy; it uses event-based triggers (like a change in status or tag) and custom workflow to send forms, trainings, quizzes, texts, and Pulse messages to keep drivers invested and engaged so that they’re more likely to make it to the hired stage.

Reinforce the Impression – Pre-hire Online Training in Onboarding

Especially since March, 2020, online onboarding has become exceedingly popular on a global level, and it’s no different in trucking. Letting drivers complete onboarding training before they physically arrive at orientation offers both soft and hard savings for carriers, saving them hundreds or thousands of dollars on manpower, hotels, and meals. Shortening orientation classes, something drivers are openly begrudging about, is a much appreciated convenience for busy drivers who need to get on the road quickly.

Using Tenstreet’s Online Onboarding in a Box solution:

• aligns orientation classes with CDC recommendations to enable social distancing
• brings more meaning to the in-person time (by moving the rote stuff offline)
• reduces cost and gets to revenue faster by minimizing time in the classroom
• improves retention rates, a benefit that comes from having a robust, driver-friendly onboarding strategy
• executes a winning onboarding solution for both drivers and carriers

Keep the Momentum Going – Post-hire Driver Management and CSA in Safety

Make a lasting impression by continuing to build an environment of lifelong learning. Drivers are more likely to stay with a carrier longer if they see they’re investing in them and encouraging their growth.

Our Driver Management service can help here – it tracks your driver’s accidents and incidents and uses automated workflow to send video trainings and quizzes to drivers based on the rules you use in your points system. Bulk training allows you to refresh the whole fleet on a topic at once, such as winter driving every November.

Carriers who enjoy our CSA integration have immediate transparency into how their drivers are performing – it pulls daily carrier and driver FMCSA CSA data into the Tenstreet dashboard and includes tools that allow you to manage your analytics, getting you on the road to improved safety.

Let Drivers Take the Wheel with Self-Guided Training

The Tenstreet Training Content Library has recently been made available for free for drivers, allowing them to access classes from our 260+ and growing library of titles. The Driver Pulse app will store all passed trainings so they can share their certifications with carriers. Carriers who have a strong presence in safety encourage and even reward drivers for their initiative because it ultimately supports their organizational safety goals.

For a complete list of course titles, see our Onboarding Page.

See these Services in Action

Automatically pushing targeting training to your drivers at key intervals throughout their lifecycle, promoting professional development, and encouraging drivers to take ownership of their own education helps drivers to adopt a safety first mentality – one that will help your company create a culture of safety and avoid the risk of a nuclear verdict in the future.

Are you interested in what this might look like in your Tenstreet dashboard? Watch our How to Improve Driver Performance through Targeted Training webinar below, or skip right to the demo at the 12:48 mark.