After working with various carriers and their management team to identify the number of drivers who have one-year term medical cards or less or worse, have been medically disqualified, it has been eye-opening for both parties!
Carriers are losing many skilled drivers due to their health
The first realization is that it’s an unknown figure to the management team. Driver’s card length or the number of drivers getting disqualified each month are not visible to management responsible for making decisions. Typically, your team gets notified when an exam is due but not when a driver is at-risk or disqualified. In most cases, Carriers run from 45% to 55% with less than one-year cards of their driver pool. With these numbers of at-risk drivers and disqualifications, carriers are losing skilled drivers in troves.
The second realization is business leaders don’t know the driver’s tenure with the organization or industry. A longer-term driver might mean that their health has declined significantly due to their sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle. In my experience working with disqualified drivers, it’s not unusual that 80% of drivers have safe driving records, but since they are susceptible to unhealthy habits on the road, their health starts declining drastically over time. Therefore, the longer a driver has been driving, the more likely their health is at risk. As a result, I’ve seen carriers lose between 8% to 11% of drivers each year.
These numbers are crucial to uncovering your new segment of drivers to recruit from and what strategies to deploy to get them back on the road or keep them driving. In turn, this will lead to a significant reduction in recruitment and retention costs.
Here are the five stats every carrier needs to start tracking for a good handle on driver diagnosis
- The number of disqualified and at-risk drivers per month: Get your compliance department to obtain the number of disqualification and at-risk drivers. If they don’t have these numbers readily available, they should go to your Third-Party Administrator (TPA) to pull these reports. Be sure to have them pull historical numbers from years back.
- The duration of each driver’s DOT medical card: Segment the report of drivers who have a one-year card, six-month card, three-month card, and a 30-day card. These drivers are considered at-risk drivers.
- The number of total drivers: Compare the total number of drivers to how many drivers have equal or less than a one-year card. The percentage might startle you.
- A driver’s driving record rate: Get insight into each driver’s driving records and rate them to easily visualize the great, the good, and the bad. It might be that if a driver gets disqualified but has a poor driving record, they need additional support than just health and wellness needs.
- A driver’s tenure: Understand how long the driver has been with your organization or driving altogether.
Other key metrics to monitor could be the driver’s compliance report, profitability, and customer service satisfaction rate.
If you need help with how to start tracking or where you can start collecting the data, contact one of our experts. We’ll gladly help you gather these stats, diagnose them, and determine if there’s an opportunity to ‘rebuild’ drivers so you can reduce recruiting costs and minimize business disruption.