Continual development, career progression and employee engagement are inextricably linked. High employee engagement increases safety and compliance levels along with your bottom line. It’s also great for employee retention, productivity levels, and attracting new recruits.
In a nutshell, engaged employees are the ones who’ll produce better business outcomes. They’ll go the extra mile for your business and your customers.
→ Download Now: Guide - Why Online Training is Essential For Logistics and Transportation
Given how much employees value continual learning opportunities - particularly millennials and Gen X employees - it’s surprising how little some businesses invest in it. 59% of millennials rate opportunities to learn and grow ‘extremely important’ when applying for a job.
Health and safety updates and compliance training are ongoing considerations when it comes to the quality of your fleet. Reaching a remote workforce with continual learning and development opportunities is key to the engagement, safety, and retention of your workforce. It shouldn’t rely on instructor-led classroom training either. Having distributed teams calls for a digital solution to training.
Organizations that neglect the continual development of their workforce risk being left behind. Or worse, falling foul to the looming driver shortage that’s threatening the transportation and logistics sector.
Why is training important for fleet drivers?
Just 14% of logistics and transport businesses invested in training and upskilling. This figure is surprising, especially when training is recognised as the second priority for the success of logistics and transportation businesses, the number one concern was improving the industry’s image. Continual development for fleet drivers answers both of these concerns.
Keeping knowledge fresh, particularly around safety and compliance issues, reduces incidents and increases employee confidence.
In the U.S., the average cost of a commercial trucking accident with one person injured is around $148,279. Logistics companies lose $151 billion on injuries. Neither of these figures include the additional emotional and mental impact injuries have on your workforce.
Boosting driver skills and knowledge keeps your business safe and ahead of your competitors. Dispersing simple tips around fuel-efficient driving techniques can save your business thousands each year.
Continual training boosts your fleet’s performance, reduces overheads and increases employee engagement. When done well, continual training creates a cycle of business benefits. Each of these benefits compounds over time to improve your company’s image and bottom line.
When it comes to attracting and retaining your younger drivers, continual development opportunities are the number one consideration for Millennials who by 2025, will account for roughly 64% of the world's labour force along with Gen Z.
Neglecting the development of fleet employees leaves your company exposed to the many risks facing the logistics and transportation sector. Poor employer image makes recruiting younger workers difficult. Deteriorating skill levels increase incidents and compliance issues. Unclear career progression opportunities escalate employee attrition rates. The list goes on.
Simply put, there’s a lot to gain from continually developing fleet drivers and even more to lose from neglecting it.
How to effectively train your remote teams
When it comes to development opportunities for drivers and other remote workers, traditional classroom learning isn’t viable anymore. Online learning delivered via a desktop computer is equally as inefficient to logistics - truck drivers and warehouse workers are on their feet all day. When it comes to distributed workers without a permanent desk, mobile learning opportunities are ideal.
Smartphones give drivers access to ‘anywhere learning opportunities’. Your employees are already comfortable with this technology, as it is what they are accustomed to using in their leisure time. Almost half of the world’s population use smartphones every day. Adapting training methods to technology that’s already being used is the smartest way to engage your workforce.
By leveraging mobile learning, your training imparts invaluable information in a fraction of the time - just 10 to 15 minutes. Bite-sized microlearning formats have been proven to be 18% more effective than traditional methods. Lessons are more memorable and easier to fit into a driver’s schedule too.
Along with better engagement levels and retention of information, creating microlearning modules are simpler for fleet trainers to create, update and keep track of. It’s a win/win for managers and drivers.
Fitting an hour-long classroom training session into a drivers week is costly and more often than not, ineffective. When you take drivers away from the wheel for an extended period of time, you eat into their productivity. Lost time comes at a cost.
On the other hand, lessons that leverage microlearning take between 3-5 minutes, so can be easily inserted into a driver’s workday. These lessons can cover anything from fuel-efficient driving techniques to best driving postures for avoiding back pain.
Including short quizzes at the end helps learners consolidate information and provides instant feedback.
Immediate feedback is important for learning for a number of reasons. It helps develop a deeper understanding of the topic - even when the feedback shows an incorrect answer. It also improves engagement and helps learners instantly modify behaviour.
By giving a clearer sense of where people are, they’re able to identify skills they need to develop. This can lead to self-directed learning and an appetite for more. It reaffirms the positive feedback loop for employee engagement and commitment to the business they’re part of.
Mobile learning on a smartphone has the added benefit of lending itself to gamification. By gamifying training modules, engagement increases along with the ability to absorb and retain information.
Gamifying also lends itself to simulating real-life situations and problem-solving opportunities. Tapping into an employees love of puzzles or quizzes makes refresher training a desirable activity they can enjoy through their workday.
There’s no more cajoling drivers to attend skills refresher training.
The data collected from these bite-sized modules gives businesses a far better understanding of fleet driver’s strengths and their skills gaps. When you deliver in-person training, it’s usually to a group and unless individuals directly communicate it to you, there’s no way of pinpointing exactly who knows what.
When you have the numbers in front of you, you can create more personalized learning journeys and development opportunities.
Accessible ongoing training and continuous learning opportunities are easy to create with eduMe’s mobile-first remote training tool. Enjoyable, short-form instruction videos and personalized learning journeys for teams and individuals can be set up easily.
One leading North American logistics company used our mobile training platform to boost engagement with training material to 90+ and resultantly reduced workforce injuries by 26%. Training quality improved, but time taken to train was reduced by 5000 hours. This saved them $60,000 on training in the first year of use.
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