Incentives for Safety in Trucking?

That’s sort of the point of creating bonus incentives ... to keep drivers uninterested in shopping around their skills and good resume

 

Own your own truck then downtime=real money!

Drive a cabover then accident=death!

Safety first!

 

I used to get a "incident free" bonus every 6 months with a carrier. It amounted to about a penny a mile,,,that was long time ago.
Another Carrier gave me 2 million mile plaque, told them I would have preferred the $8.00 and tossed plaque in garbage in the lunchroom so they knew I was serious.
I don't take any of the awards BS seriously because its just my job. Go from point A to B without hitting anything.
Your license history is the only thing that really counts.

 

When I worked for the blasting company I received a $100 gift card every year at Christmas. Not much considering we successfully didn’t blow anyone up all year.

 

I hauled powder exclusively for 10 years. One of the powder men I knew had a hole fire when he was tamping a 30' hole road side. Rattled him but no permanent injuries, one lucky dude!.
My old powder truck

 

With Service Transport, we get .10 a loaded mile paid quarterly. It's easy to get if you do what your supposed to. I like it. It's about an extra 4 -5,000 every year.

 

It’s kind of like taking good care of that significant other or spouse. You try and keep them happy so they don’t jump the fence.

For example I always got my ex wife a toaster on our anniversaries and Arby’s coupons other times throughout the year. These performance incentives were always met with astonishment.

But still, sometimes you can do everything right to try and keep a good hand but you still lose them.

 

We had some very close calls with flyrock, but didn’t have anything tragically exciting happen out on the road

 

The best saftey incentive i’ve ever seen is the one where you get to keep your job.

A boss who holds his drivers to a high standard, and is Proud of his company’s reputation is key. Be willing to fire any employee who hurts the company’s reputation or practices unsafe driving habits.

A drivers appearance and attitude directly correlate to his driving mannerisms. A disheveled looking driver is most likely a unsafe driver. (If he doesn’t care how he looks or about his health/hygiene, what does he care about? Anything???

His attitude the same, if he’s quick to cuss you out he’ll be just as quick to cuss a customer out, and road rage with traffic.

When everybody knows that stuff don’t fly here, you end up with drivers who hold there heads high. They respect you, your company, your customers, and they act accordingly.

I do support a year end bonus, preferably in the Thanksgiving check. This allows for the money to be used for Christmas shopping! Saftey bonus, you get to work here another year.

Backstory...

I’ve worked both ends. I had the boss i just described to you, directly followed by the complete opposite. The former was better (even if it took hindsight to figure that out).

The other boss let everything go. Wrecked trucks, extreme milking of the clock, purposly passing your work off to others, leaving freight sitting on the dock, frequent call outs. All get a slap on the wrist. When he gets pissed and institutes a new policy...within two weeks it was forgotten about & we were back to normal like nothing ever happend. The kind of boss i thought would be great, just breeze thru life man. Truth be told, it was horrible just plain horrible.

The strict boss i loved at times and hated at times. But he was fair and true. F up & he’d have your backside. The drivers got along great, always helping each other out. I to this day regret making that change. Turn over was actually pretty darn low. Out of 100 trucks, less than 10-15 drivers per year.

 

So an incentive is necessary to be a safe driver?
That is so sad.

The only incentive I need is to know that I didn't kill someone, or myself, today because of my own carelessness.