The most important thing you can do from a company perspective is be as close to the customer as possible. There's no one at your company that's closer to the customer than your drivers. Being in touch with the driver and making sure you have a good feel for what they need to do to an effective job in representing your organization is critical to the success of your organization. I think you'll start seeing more and more activity in terms of the driver-carrier relationship becoming more of a partnership as opposed to an employee-employer relationship. You'll see carriers start to use tools such as driver portals that give drivers 24-hour communications access to their carrier. Giving the driver as much information and knowledge as possible is going to help increase retention, particularly when they feel they're part of the organization, that their voice is being heard and that they're being treated fairly.

One example could be a driver who has a history of hard braking. If a particular driver has three hard-braking incidents within a specified time frame, the carrier should have a procedure in place that is automatically put into action. That procedure could be something as simple as a face-to-face meeting to discuss the issue or a simple warning letter the first time it happens, escalating all the way up to a mandatory re-training session with an instructor or a simulator after the third such incident.It's much easier to intervene and take corrective action before something happens, versus after the fact when it's too late. The foresight to put a program like this in place is very important in terms of protecting your fleet, as well as the safety of the driver and the motoring public.

One of the most important things carriers can do once they've brought a driver on board it to make sure that they have policies, procedures and corrective protocols in place so that in the event a threshold is crossed based upon whatever parameters you've established, that there are specific activities and actions in place to deal with it. That will enable the carrier to manage that particular behavior as quickly as possible in order to mitigate your risk.

I think having really strong driver communication and having tools in place to facilitate that communication, to facilitate coaching that driver to help them become a more effective driver for your fleet and make them feel part of your organization; those are all things that are important, but the ultimate goal has to be to hire the right drivers in the first place.The importance of attracting good quality drivers with stable records is going to become even more of an issue for carriers because that driver's record is going to live with that carrier for the next 24 months, whether that driver is with them or not. Therefore, it's very important for carriers to screen every driver they look at prior to hiring them in order to ensure those new hires don't adversely affect their CSA score. Transient drivers, in particular, can do a lot of damage to a carrier's score in a short period of time, and then they move on and it's the carrier that's stuck with damage that will take two years or more to undo.