Driver Time Theft: What Employers Can Do

Time is indeed money, which is why fleet managers need to use effective methods to protect them from time theft by drivers. Without oversight, you are at the mercy of drivers taking long lunches, running personal errands and moonlighting.

Types of Time Theft

Taking a long lunch and doing personal errands are at the minor end of the scale when it comes to time theft. That isn’t to say it doesn’t add up, especially if you have a large number of drivers in your fleet.

But more serious is moonlighting, using your trucks and gear to perform jobs on the side. This is especially troublesome because it sets your company up for liability issues, which is potentially more costly than the theft involved.

The dangers come from several elements:

• If injuries occur during the moonlighting, they quite possibly will get reported as having happened on the job.
• If the worker is tired from working all weekend or part of the night, he can be so exhausted that he can easily cause an accident at work and get injured.
• You can suffer damage to your reputation if the worker does a substandard job.
• You can be liable for warranty costs if the worker wrongly convinces the customer that he is doing the job officially for your company.
• If an accident happens using the company vehicle, the company insurance rates might be affected and it must pay for uncovered repair costs.

How to Stop Time Theft

On the motivational front, educating drivers can help them understand how time theft hurts everyone because it makes such a hit on the company’s bottom line. When money is wasted, it can’t go to higher pay, better vehicles, timely repairs and worker benefits.

Some businesses have decided to work with the desire of those employees who want to start a side business. They have initiated accounting programs that discuss how to read a profit and loss statement, the difference between markup and profit margin, how to calculate the true cost of overhead and other business information.

In addition, they offer to help employees to openly establish a business. This sometimes takes the form of offering help with call taking, accounting and purchasing, in return for a stake in the new business. The idea is to set up the business outside of the service territory you have already claimed.

On a practical level, to stop time theft you need to get an accurate reporting of how actual hours worked by your drivers. Checking this takes the time, effort and money involved to watch your drivers throughout the day.

A better method is using a GPS fleet tracker management system. This gives you accurate time reporting, without requiring hours out of your day.

With a GPS fleet monitoring system, you are assured that your drivers are getting paid strictly for the time they work. It logs hours automatically, sending the data directly to payroll. They can track a range of data, including arrivals, departures, invoicing and schedules.

Oversight is how you tackle the problem of time theft. Driver education and GPS tracking can both be a part of the solution.

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