Unmanaged driver burnout silently severely impacts fleet safety, productivity, and profitability. Combating it requires combining forward-rotating shift schedules with real-time AI fatigue monitoring technology to detect risks before accidents happen.
Driver burnout is one of the most overlooked issues in the fleet management sector. It’s not easy to notice and only reveals itself through a decrease in productivity levels, frequent mistakes, complaints from clients, accidents, high employee turnover, and eventually a loss in revenue. To manage it, you need a combination of fatigue monitoring technology and operational practices that prioritise driver well-being.
In today’s article, we break down the impact of shift-based driver burnout on the business and cover the reasons why it should never be overlooked. We share the best practices for mitigating the issue and show you how our camera technology helps with detecting the signs.
Your main objective in reducing shift-based driver burnout should be to create a culture within your teams where driver well-being is as high a priority as other priorities. It shouldn’t just be a matter of meeting compliance standards. This is done through:
Implementing these measures helps you cover all important areas that lead to burnout and road accidents.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of our tips for combating driver burnout:
Create a formal set of guidelines and rules that outline what’s expected from all team members (managers, drivers, dispatchers, etc.) regarding the issue of burnout and how to combat it. The document should provide managers with the signs to look out for and the appropriate course of action. It should also indicate the required driver rest periods as per compliance standards and best practices for shift planning.
Shift arrangement makes all the difference. Drivers should have enough time to rest before their next shift, but this isn’t always the case, especially during peak season, when the demand is high and deadlines are tight. Dispatchers should evaluate their scheduling patterns and identify the root causes of these clashes and how to fix them.
The best way to avoid scheduling conflicts is to always create shifts that are forward-rotating instead of backwards. This means the weekly shifts of each driver should follow the natural progression of the day. For example:
It improves driver sleep quality and gives them enough time to recover. It also ensures fairness, so no driver feels like they do more night shifts than the other.
Now for the technology. AI camera technology plays a huge role in reducing accidents caused by driver burnout. They detect signs of driver fatigue like yawning and drowsiness, then release audible alerts to prompt them to maintain alertness. As a fleet manager, you’ll receive this fatigue data so you can talk to your drivers about it and get to the root of what’s causing the behaviour.
Besides having this in the policies, fleet managers need extensive training on driver burnout so they can understand the issue better, recognise the signs, and know what actions to take. This sort of training should cover things like creating realistic schedules, the body’s natural sleeping clock, and how to address the issue of fatigue with drivers.
Sometimes drivers feel undervalued, and their hard work goes unnoticed. This leads to them becoming stressed and unhappy, and feeling like they have no support in the workplace, which affects their performance. To avoid this, you must have leaderboards to monitor performance and implement incentive programmes to reward and motivate drivers who are doing well.
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Driver burnout affects a business in many ways. Some of the major effects include:
Overlooking driver well-being can bring the company a major loss in revenue.
When drivers are burnt out, they become absent-minded on the road. This leads to frequent road accidents due to more mistakes, like forgetting to indicate or missing stop signs. Accidents can have tragic outcomes that could devastate an entire team. With that also comes staff shortages, costly legal disputes, an increase in the cost of vehicle repairs and damage to the company image.
Unhealthy working conditions can make more drivers eager to leave the company. A high employee turnover sets the company back in time and money because recruiters need to redo the hiring process. According to FirstUp, replacing one employee costs 50% to 200% of their annual salary. High turnover also leads to low team morale because team members are more likely to be saddened by the wave of goodbyes.
As already mentioned, drivers become absent-minded; they’re physically and mentally drained. You’ll notice a lot of paperwork errors, absenteeism, forgetfulness and reduced productivity levels. This results in more downtime and client dissatisfaction, which leads to a loss of revenue.
Many people confuse driver fatigue with burnout; although the two feed off each other, they’re not the same thing. The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes burnout as a psychological syndrome caused by chronic work overload and stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. Fatigue, on the other hand, refers to extreme tiredness due to lack of sleep or physical strain.
You can recover from fatigue by simply getting enough rest and switching to a healthier diet.
Burnout is more than just physical strain and therefore can’t be fixed by just staying in bed for a couple of days. It’s a result of months or years of working beyond your limits, under a lot of pressure, and not making time to recover. It requires professional help.
When fatigue is left unaddressed, it can cause emotional and psychological issues that will eventually lead to complete burnout, which is why some of the signs are the same. So basically, if your drivers don’t get enough rest between their shifts, they’ll become fatigued, and if the work conditions continue that way, they’ll eventually be burnt out.
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At Cartrack, we assist you with managing driver fatigue and burnout by offering our AI-powered cameras, driver coaching solutions, ADAS, seat vibrators, and a digital logbook. Together, these solutions help prevent fatigue-related accidents, saving lives and fleet costs.
Here’s how our solutions work:
ADAS is a top-level camera system that can be seen as an extra eye for drivers. The cameras are AI-powered, which means they can detect fatigue-related driver behaviour such as drowsiness and yawning. Once the camera notices this, it’ll release audible alerts so drivers can be more alert or stop their vehicles to take breaks if they have to. This helps prevent accidents and damage to cargo.
The ADAS system also monitors what happens outside the vehicles, alerting drivers to hazardous behaviour like tailgating and lane departures. You’ll get reports of all these incidents so you can investigate further.
Once dangerous driving habits are detected, what do you need to do? More training! For this reason, we’ve got a driver coaching platform that highlights all the fatigue-related incidents of each driver, detailing how many times they were repeated. Once drivers are sent for coaching, the coaches can leave a note of what was discussed so you can track progress.
Our driver coaching platform has helped many businesses fight the issue of fatigue. Within a few months, they see results.
For example, one of the mining companies that has partnered with us uses our ADAS and coaching platform. They have a fleet of nearly 2000 vehicles and a workforce of over 7000 drivers. Over the past nine months, they’ve detected and addressed 383 cases of fatigue. In an industry where one mistake could be fatal for many. This has already saved the lives of many.
As an extra safety measure, you can install seat vibrators into your vehicles. The vibrators work with the AI camera system. After the camera releases an audible alert to keep the driver awake, the seat vibrator will also go off to ensure the body gets the message because sometimes someone can be so deep in their sleep that they hear nothing.
Use our digital logbook system to ensure drivers stick to the daily HOS and take enough breaks during each shift. This system not only helps you meet compliance but also helps you make sure that drivers are not overworking themselves to meet deadlines.
Remember! Technology alone won’t end driver burnout and fatigue. As a manager, you need to genuinely be concerned about the well-being of your drivers and have measures in place to ensure everyone is okay. We’re here to ensure you’re extra safe and spot the signs so you can quickly address them. Make sure you contact us today.
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Discover causes and signs of driver fatigue and burnout. Find out how Cartrack can help reduce the risks and support safer driving.
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