Trucks move roughly 72% of the nation’s freight.
Increased consumer demand, unfortunately, is being met with fewer people willing to take on the job to deliver the goods (no pun intended). The American Trucking Association estimates there are over 80,000 vacant trucking jobs.
Some companies that rely on mass transport are responding to the truck driver shortages with noticeable salary increases. To stay competitive, Walmart is offering to pay their drivers close to $90,000 a year—tipping the scale on the average salary significantly. But for companies that aren’t taking in over $514 billion in revenue, drastic salary hikes may not be the most realistic solution.
Trucking isn’t the only sector of the transportation industry being hit by a worker shortage. Public transit is grappling with a bus driver and rail worker shortage nationwide.
How can the transportation industry balance its worker shortage with its need to manage costs? A workforce management system that shows your gaps in oversight to unlock potential efficiencies can help.
Control Overtime Costs with Enhanced Visibility
Organizations that still rely on paper processes consider roughly 27% of their overtime costs to be unbudgeted.
After all, when schedulers do not have complete visibility of employees’ hours and instead rely on tribal knowledge, they will not be able to anticipate overtime costs. Mentally tracking overtime or manually typing hours worked into an Excel spreadsheet increases the risk of the scheduler not being acutely aware of which employees are close to exceeding their 40 hours.
Another issue is assigning overtime (or too much overtime) when it isn’t even necessary. When dealing with issues like worker shortages, short-term solutions like overtime hours seem easiest. But if you don’t have insights into your historical and current labor information–and they aren’t taken into account at the point of scheduling—then you could very well find yourself scheduling overtime to accommodate for a smaller workforce during off-peak production cycles.
With Indeavor, our automated employee scheduling and absence management system, you can input company restrictions based on your specific business needs to prevent unnecessary overtime. Each shift employee will be assessed by these rules when the schedule automatically generates. This assures that managers won’t be blindsided when an employee was given overtime because they were working to fit an anticipated need.
Match Labor with Demand Automatically
Wouldn’t it be nice to catch overstaffing before it happens?
By having real-time data easily accessible from anywhere, you can now schedule employees to match only what you need. Without these workforce analytics, managers and the C-suite are learning from dated emails or lagged reports that overtime costs went over budget for the week, or two employees were dismissed after not doing anything for five hours because they weren’t needed. With such data, your organization can mitigate these unnecessary overtime and reporting pay hours.
Optimize the Skillset of Your Current Workforce
We went over how the right workforce management solution can help you cut costs by uncovering efficiencies elsewhere, but how does all that ensure you’re managing your current workforce correctly? Cost-saving measures are great, but only if it doesn’t come at the expense of the people who currently work at the organization.
That’s where our job bidding feature comes in.
It allows employees to pick different options for what their future base schedules would like like—even up to an entire year. By digitizing job bidding, employees select and prioritize their preferences (from hours and days to job function) in a centralized platform. Making employee schedules based on actual preferences is as easy as clicking a button. You’re satisfying your employees’ taste for options and flexibility, while also reaping the benefits of fully realizing the multi-faceted talents of particular workers.
You’ll leverage the entirety of your employees’ skillset rather than pigeonholing them. And in an industry that is already at the breaking point and scrambling for more employees, untapped talent (and actual interest in the role) is critical in your current workforce.
Optimize Scheduling in the Transportation Industry With Indeavor
Looking to cut overtime costs, catch overstaffing, and leverage the employees you do have? Of course you are!
Indeavor is our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. Indeavor integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
Click here to request a demo.
