4 Ways to Address the Driver Shortage in Parcel Delivery

1. Streamline Communication

Employees feel more engaged when they are familiar with the company’s values and brand. It is also important to communicate about important topics to ensure drivers feel heard, such as addressing vitality, safety, and team success stories. Additionally, since drivers face customers every day, they have lots of ideas for improvement and can be a source of relevant information.

By introducing a communication platform, parcel delivery drivers can use an app on their mobile device to receive personalized news from the company and beyond. This makes them feel more engaged. By implementing 2-way communication, such as a chat function, they can also deliver feedback to the company, strengthen internal relationships and set up events or gatherings.

2. Drive Efficiency and Improve First Time Right with Optimization

Drivers have to deal with inefficiencies every day: in the warehouse, on the road, and during parcel deliveries (like customer no-shows). As a result, they face long working hours, late deliveries, unhappy customers, and having to rush through the day. All of this makes the job very stressful.

Using advanced routing optimizers, you can calculate an optimal sequence within seconds, taking many details like inner-city characteristics and expected traffic congestion into account. This means that the driver can confidently load parcels at the warehouse, knowing that drive times will be reliable. If things change on the road, you can communicate updated arrival times to customers, so the pressure to meet unfeasible delivery times is removed.

You can also use Machine Learning, historical information and feedback from drivers to improve operations. For example, based on historical data and applying Machine Learning, stop times and driving times can be made much more accurate. Also, drivers can report ideas how to make warehouses processes more efficient.

3. Apply Gamification to Improve Driving Behavior

Drivers want to be relaxed on the road, not pushed by complaints and questions from their manager or stressed due to late deliveries.

A driver incentive program is an effective approach to improve satisfaction. Consider introducing a driver scorecard to provide insights based on the driver’s performance, rankings and related events. This will enable you to build daily and weekly score analyses and trends over time. Drivers can see how they rank compared to others in their department and benchmark themselves against their organization’s averages in aspects such as safety, efficiency, and fuel consumption. You can apply gamification by publishing a top drivers list, and use incentives like awards or bonus payments.

4. Develop an (online) Training Program

Historically, it’s been very difficult to train new drivers, as they had to familiarize themselves with the local area, its characteristics, and restrictions. Optimizing the sequence of a route is almost impossible for new drivers. This makes it very hard to outsource or exchange routes. But by current state-of-the-art optimization technology, outsourcing becomes much easier,

On top of this, you can introduce an onboarding program, a communication platform, optimizers, and incentives. This will help you engage the driver from day 1. Drivers will start their day confidently, knowing what their goals are. They will also have the support they need to achieve them: their route is optimized and reliable and there are opportunities to communicate with others and provide feedback.

Conclusion

Transport and distribution still need humans to do the work. In the end, it comes down to the decisions drivers are making behind the steering wheel. In all discussions about digitization and optimization, the valuable impact for the driver is underestimated. Even though transport is the sector with the highest driver shortage, caused by absenteeism and aging, and relatively low number of new employees. Therefore, it is important to put more focus on the driver and find ways to make them happier. Technology can be a great tool for this. But remember: a great strategy to address driver shortage only works when drivers feel engaged to make it happen.