International Week of Happiness at Work – tips to improve your commercial drivers’ wellbeing

Happy man driving a van

It’s International Week of Happiness at Work.

 

A large portion of our time we spend at work, so it’s very important that we all feel happy at our workplace.

Commercial drivers may often operate in a pressured environment, so providing a safe and better work-life balance is crucial. For this reason, we wanted to share a few tips that can help you achieve this.

 

Safety should be the top priority on your list. Driving is a dangerous work activity which can contribute to work-related accidental fatalities and serious injuries. Therefore, it’s important to minimise the risks by:

  • Keeping the vehicles well-maintained
  • Ensuring drivers are trained properly
  • Providing regular training programmes
  • Reducing distraction by introducing clear policies such as Mobile Phone Usage Policy
  • Ensuring effective route planning and optimisation to provide drivers with enough time and best routes to finish their job
  • Having a clear accident procedure in place

Mental Health and Wellbeing

Poor mental health increases the risks of accidents. With this in mind, our article How mental health and emotional wellbeing can affect driving can be a good source to share with your drivers. You can also browse our Driver Factsheet Library here to help inform your drivers about some other important safety tips and considerations.

Visit Ben’s website which is a charity that supports people of the automotive industry, that has a full hand of helpful resources and information.

Good communication can help your employees to know and understand what is expected from them and what they can expect from the job. Having an appropriate medium, as well as communicating clear messages can help you minimise confusion and lack of trust.

Listening to your staff views and opinion is also crucial – happy employees deliver better service. Communication shouldn’t go one way only, so create an environment where your employees feel heard and are encouraged to provide open and honest feedback.

Even a small gesture of appreciation can have a huge impact on your commercial drivers. Hard work and dedication shouldn’t go unnoticed, so having in place a reward and recognition policy is important. Also consider a graduated incentives program to promote employee retention within your business.

Employee recognition isn’t only going to affect your employees positively, but it can help your business to increase engagement and performance.

When your employees are offered progression and development opportunities, this can help them be more engaged and committed to their job. Offer different seminars and courses to inform your commercial drivers about the different factors affecting your industry, and provide them with an opportunity to excel or learn new skills.

Clearly communicate what opportunities are there and try to encourage career development.

Our approach at KINTO to promote happiness at work

At KINTO, creating positive working environment and having happy employees is on the list of our top priorities, so we continuously try to introduce initiatives that encourage and maintain a sustainable work-life balance.

Find out more here.