Honesty is the Best Policy and Fleet Tracking Never Lies
Every business owner wants to trust their employees. Unfortunately, many business owners experience a level of disappointment after installing vehicle tracking units on their fleet because, unlike humans, fleet tracking software never lies.
Some companies decide to tell their employees right away that a vehicle tracking system is being installed, while others like to wait and observe driver behavior for a few months before letting the cat out of the bag. It can be a difficult decision when a business feels like a family.
Typically, business owners discover that the majority of their drivers and technicians are behaving as they expect, but a few are being less than honest about how they’re spending their day and their company’s time.
For example, one company’s vehicles were idling almost a thousand minutes a month despite frequent reminders to turn off trucks when not in use. After installing vehicle tracking, it was cut down to 40 to 50 minutes per month. The cost savings were enormous.
That same company had a driver that the owner knew should be getting home earlier and was also burning too much gas for his particular route. The owner found out that the driver was running personal errands with the company truck, stopping in convenience stores for long periods of time without buying gas. The owner asked him why someone had seen him there and he would reply with, “I needed cigarettes.” He would go out to long lunches and not clock out for them. When asked about lunches, the driver always told his boss that he wanted to get home quicker so he didn’t take a lunch. He would be at a location working, leave that location to drive 5 miles across town to his house and stay there anywhere from 25 minutes to 2 hours. Then he would drive back to the same location. His boss asked the employee why one of his friends saw the company truck at the employee’s house in the middle of the day and he responded, “I had to get a rain coat.” The business owner was curious as to why it would take someone 1.5 hours to get a raincoat.
Thankfully, the business owner set up alerts through his fleet tracking system, so he was sent a text every time the employee was at his home address. Once it had happened far too many times, the employee was let go. He then filed for wrongful termination and denied stopping at his house. The owner had already sent the Points of Interest (POI’s) report (showing the number of times and for how long the employee was at his home address) from his vehicle tracking software to the unemployment office. Two days later, the owner got the denied unemployment claim in the mail, never to hear from the employee again.
This goes to show that honesty is the best policy because even if an employee isn’t honest, the vehicle tracking system is.
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- Categorized under: Driver Performance, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking
