How can I help my truck drivers understand what we pay them?
If you were to ask a truck driver why they left past companies, what do you think they would say? Most truck drivers will tell you the trucking company they worked for shorted their pay. Often, they will not describe their former employer kindly. If you ask enough drivers, you may start to think that nearly every trucking company cheats drivers out of hard-earned pay. While I am sure there are some morally questionable people in trucking, it can’t be all of them, right?
With that in mind, it seems to me that the answer is that many trucking companies pay their drivers the correct amount. They just are not good at explaining pay to the driver. So, how can we fix that so truck drivers understand what they are being paid?
Show your work!
The answer may be as easy as it seems. Show your work! Either give the drive an easy-to-understand settlement sheet or put it on the paystub. List their runs and pay for each run. List the detention by the load. List the extra stop pay by the load. If you do this, any issues the drivers have will be easy to resolve. Instead of leaving your company and telling everyone how you cheated them, they will stay.
Want to take it a step further? One of our clients lists the loads that the driver completed but has not yet been paid for. Usually, the reason they have not been paid is the paperwork was not turned in on time so they would get it next week. It’s really handy to see loads that are two or three weeks behind that maybe got missed by the office or the driver.
From this example, the driver can see what they are paid for and what they are not paid for yet on this paycheck. (This is the bottom of the paystub, the taxes, deductions, etc. are above it.)
Wouldn’t this help reduce driver frustration? There would be a lot fewer calls to your office asking what loads they were paid for. We offer this to all of our clients. We just need the data! It is our mission to help trucking families. That means everyone. From owner to driver.
What other things would you put on a paystub to help the drivers understand their pay? Tell us below.
Written by Mike Ritzema
With over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, business planning, financial analysis, software engineering, operations, and decision analysis, Mike has the breadth and depth of experience needed to quickly understand entrepreneurs’ businesses and craft the most suitable solutions.
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