Have you stopped to think about what it takes to keep your workers happy? Whether it’s your drivers or your administration staff, there are several reasons your employees are less likely to stick around.
Each time a worker leaves, you have to spend time placing job ads, interviewing applicants, checking credentials, and doing the onboarding tasks like filling out payroll and benefits paperwork, running drug tests, and completing background checks. It’s time-consuming and costly. Check out the reasons workers are more likely to leave, and learn how to ensure they don’t impact your productivity and business’s reputation.
Key Reasons Why Drivers Leave
So what are the leading reasons employees give for leaving their company? Here are the top four.
- Lack of Growth
Is there room for growth or career development? If they’re stuck in a dead-end job, you’re not likely to keep employees around. You need to make sure there are ways for your employees to enhance their skills and learn new things. If it’s possible to offer promotions, make sure you do.
One way to create room for growth is by growing your company. Start small, but expand as you can. If you grow your business, you could appoint one of your trusted drivers to be a district manager and handle the route planning and management of drivers in a certain area.
Grow your company by looking into business lines of credit and making sure you’re paid on time. If you have shippers or brokers who don’t always pay on time, it can impact your credit score and lead to higher interest rates. If you factor your invoices, you get paid that same day or within no more than two days, which allows you to pay your bills quickly.
What if you have no plans to expand your company? How can you offer chances to grow when you don’t plan to increase your company’s size? Offer training programs after asking your employees what they’d like to learn. You might have a driver who wants to become certified to take loads for FEMA. Work with your employees to come up with programs and training sessions they want.
- Wage and Salary Complaints
Pay is one of the biggest reasons for high turnover rates. If you’re not paying close to or more than the competition, you’re likely to lose workers. If you’ve ever had to delay payments because you’re not getting paid on time, it’s going to cause serious issues with your workers and could lead to complaints with the state that causes headaches you don’t want to deal with.
What if you’d like to beat the competition’s starting wages, but you just can’t compete yet? You don’t always have to have the lowest wages if you offer a better arrangement. While many companies pay bi-weekly or weekly, do one better and offer to pay workers twice a week or once you get paid by the freight factoring company.
Stagnant wages are another big reason why an employee may leave. And, it’s another area where freight factoring can help out. If you haven’t offered a wage increase, you’re not giving employees an incentive to stay. At a bare minimum, you need to provide cost of living increases to ensure your workers are not struggling to stay afloat.
If you’re growing your company and can’t cut paychecks or offer raises because your clients haven’t paid on time, you need to take immediate action. Get a line of credit to ensure you can pay your employees. Switch to invoice factoring so that you’re paid quickly. If you get paid within a day of your drivers’ deliveries, you have the money available to pay your drivers.
- Lack of Team Bonding
When your workers don’t feel they’re part of the team, it’s hard to feel connected to the job. Create opportunities to connect as a team. Set aside some revenues and host a team-building getaway for your workers, their significant others, and children. It doesn’t have to be an expensive getaway if there’s no budget for it. You could host a company barbecue at your headquarters or pay for a day at a local theme park or zoo with a group banquet for socializing.
- Benefits Packages
The final thing to consider is the benefits package you offer. Workers need certain benefits, and you need to make sure you’re offering benefits like 401k, health and dental insurance, and even life insurance. Short-term disability, paid family leave, and gym membership discounts are other appreciated perks you can offer.
Keeping your workers happy is part of the picture. You also need to look at what’s necessary for you to stay in a good mood.
What Do You Need?
While you want your drivers and employees to stay with your company, you also need to be happy. Running a trucking company is hard work, as you have to keep up with insurance coverage, bills, CDL licenses, taxes, etc. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes dealings that your employees don’t always get to see.
Ensure you’re relaxed and stress-free, as no one likes to work for a moody boss. For this reason, make sure you’re looking at what you need to be a productive, content business owner.
You don’t want to spend hours all week worrying about being able to pay your workers. You don’t want to lose them to your competitors. They’re great employees, and you want them to stay with you. It’s stressful, but you can take steps to ensure you’re providing a great place to work by offering what employees want for benefits and wages. Do this by ensuring you’re paid on time by your brokers and shippers.
How much time are you spending on invoicing, chasing down late payments, filing paperwork, and depositing checks you receive from clients? If you still get checks for payments, you have to wait for the check to clear, and that can also lead to stress, especially if you’ve ever received a check that bounced.
Eliminate the anxiety and stress by working with a freight factoring specialist. Saint John Capital is your partner in ensuring same-day payments. If you get paid in a timely manner, you’re able to pay your employees on time. You also enjoy being able to factor your invoice and avoid spending hours of your valuable time creating and sending out invoices and chasing down payments. With our freight invoice factoring services, you get paid within hours of completing a haul.
We have outstanding factoring rates to ensure you get the majority of your money and aren’t losing out to hidden fees and expensive freight factoring rates. Plus, we have a job board that allows you to quickly find more work and use our free business credit reports to decide if you want to work with a new client. Sign up for same-day payments for free and try our service out by factoring just a couple of invoices to see what you think.
