If you’re a trucker who’s serious about your career, make sure you think about ways to maintain a healthy lifestyle—both in and out of the driver’s seat. Do you own a trucking company or are part of a company’s management team? Consider implementing a driver wellness plan. Healthy drivers will help minimize staff retention challenges and make open positions on your team more attractive to newer, younger drivers.
Driver wellness programs are growing in popularity across the country and for good reason—they help prevent illness, boost productivity, and enhance life satisfaction. Healthy drivers are happier, better employees who stay at their jobs longer. They also help reverse the trend of increasing trucker turnover, a problem that has burdened the industry for the past few years as older truckers are retiring and aren’t being replaced by new drivers.
What are the reasons behind this trend? For many, these jobs, with tough, unhealthy working conditions and limited opportunities, aren’t as appealing as they once were. But thoughtful, well-designed wellness programs can help offset some of these unappealing aspects of truck driving.
In order for driver wellness programs to have a deep and lasting impact, they need to be proactive in their efforts to work with drivers, and should be thoroughly holistic, addressing all major dimensions of wellness:
- Physical: proper nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle choices
- Emotional: promoting emotional health
- Intellectual: strategies for sound mental health and development
- Occupational: creating true job satisfaction
- Social: forging meaningful community connections
- Spiritual: creating and following a meaningful set of guiding values
Here’s the bottom line: Trucking companies should make sincere and measurable efforts to support the wellness of their drivers, and when drivers make health and wellness an important part of their lives, everyone benefits.
Why Wellness in Trucking Needs to Go the Extra Mile
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