Why It's So Important To Train Your Drivers Right Now

Dealing with a worker shortage in your light-duty vocational fleet? You’re not alone. America is suffering from a surplus of jobs and a shortage of applicants. Regardless of what the cause is, you’re forced to turn your attention to hiring people as quickly as possible. However, if you want to maintain operational efficiency, you also need to focus on training your new drivers.

Why Focus on Safety Training Right Now?

It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important when you’re contending with a worker shortage. For good reason, you’re wrapped up in getting new employees through the hiring process as quickly as possible. But, before you give new-hires keys to the company car, you need to make sure they’re ready.

Remember, your company faces tremendous risk from new employees. Your new employees are much more likely to cause accidents, suffer injuries, and hurt your company as a result.

Consider these statistics from Smart Business:

• 40% of workers who suffer injuries have been on the job for less than one year
• One of every eight workplace injuries happens on an employee’s first day
• New hires are five times more likely to be injured on the job than experienced employees

Driving is the most dangerous thing your employees do. Whether they’re repairing electrical wires, spraying for pests, or fixing potholes, they’re most likely to suffer from accidents and injuries while behind the wheel. And, as we learned from Smart Business, that’s doubly true for your new hires.

As you try to grow your workforce, protect your employees and your company in the process. Train your new hires to reap the rewards of:

• Reduced accidents
• Reduced injuries
• Reduced cost of loss
• Better employee retention
• A more efficient company

How to Effectively Train New Employees

The most important time to train employees on safety and defensive driving is when you first hire them.

Investing in new employee safety training helps you to “set the tone”. You can influence your new employees to prioritize safety over getting the job done faster. You can educate your employees on the safest and best way to complete their job duties. And, you can demonstrate you’re a company that cares about its employees, thus improving retention.

Download eBook: How to Choose a Defensive Driver Safety Program

We advocate for a mixture of online, self-directed training and instructor-led safety training.

Online Safety Training

Once you hire someone, why wait until their first day to start the education process?

Modern approaches to employee safety training make it easy and affordable to offer online, self-directed training to your employees.

A program like The Fleet Safety Course will allow you to:

• Reduce your accidents and injuries by 20%
• Reduce your cost of loss and increase your profit
• Impress your employees with high-quality, outcome-based training
• Assign self-directed learning to employees from the point of hire
• Easily organize company training in a Learning Management System
• Run reports to track employee usage and completion

We recommend assigning online safety training to employees as a prerequisite to employment and paying them for their time. They’ll appreciate the flexibility to take it at their own pace.

Following this model is a cost-effective solution to safety training guaranteed to yield positive results. Companies of any size will quickly reap the benefits of lower cost of loss and time saved dealing with accidents while protecting their employees.

Instructor-Led Safety Training

Online training is the cornerstone of any employee safety program. However, depending on your business/fleet, it may not be enough on its own.

In order to achieve excellent safety results, your online safety training needs to be paired with in-person new-hire safety training.

While self-directed training is much more cost-effective, there are certain cases when there is no substitute for instructor-led training.

Instructor-led training works best for: 

• Complicated subjects
• Hands-on skills training
• Aligning new employees with company culture

You can cut costs while still achieving excellent results by using a mixture of self-directed and instructor-led training. Of course, for best results, you will want to train your trainers as well.

Set Yourself Up for Success With New-Hire Training

You’re in a race to build your staff back up amidst this worker shortage. But at what cost?

If you hire your team and fail to train them properly, you face the risk of higher accident frequency, employee injuries, workers’ comp, and increased insurance premiums. Worse yet, you could have a fatal accident on your hands.

Set yourself up for success. Invest in new-hire training alongside your hiring spree. You can transform your company into a thriving, safety-centric culture and save on cost of loss in the process.