| By :
Iain Jones
If you were to imagine that you could sit alongside your employees as they drove to each new job of work, then you would probably imagine that the situation you observed is one of somewhat greater productivity than usual. If so, then you are probably not alone. Traditionally, fleet owners had little idea of what actually took place beyond their office walls after their employees had driven away to work off-site. Businesses had no reliable means of measuring employee performance and accountability, neither could they verify a driver's whereabouts at all during the working day. Neither could managers be confident that employees were only using vehicles for their intended operational purposes. Many employees are quite understandably not as productive as they should be, when there is no direct presence of a supervisor present. A number of studies estimate that it is perfectly normal for employees to be unproductive for anywhere from one to two hours per day. For mobile employees, then the figures may well be towards the top end of the range. Extended breaks, occasional unauthorised side journeys during working hours and diversions on the way to the next job all contribute towards further non-productive time at work. Moreover, it has been reported in the Wall Street Journal that small businesses with remote or unsupervised employees have an extra challenge. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, fifty nine percent of employees outside the office exaggerate the number of hours they report as having been worked. Of course, you cannot physically accompany your employees on the road, apart from very occasionally, but you can do something that has been shown to be almost as effective, namely to use GPS tracking systems to track their vehicles and give your employees the sense that they could be observed from the office at any time. Psychologically, an employee whose vehicle is being tracked is very aware that their movements can be observed by their supervisors, which can lead to very noticeable changes in habits. One client reports that soon after fitting tracking, employees were suddenly asking in advance if it was alright to pop home to collect something that they had forgotten for the day, so even legitimate departures from the journey to and from the place of work were being carefully thought about. Independent studies have gone some way to quantify the benefits in terms of productivity, simply through investing in vehicle tracking. For example, the Aberdeen Group reported that organisations experienced a 23 percent increase in the total number of service call completed per day per technician once GPS vehicle tracking was installed in their fleets, as well as other more directly attributable benefits such as a reduction in fuel costs and travelling times. So, although you can’t physically travel alongside your employees, having a gps vehicle tracking system fitted is the next best thing, and to a large degree changes the mindset of many employees to believe that their every move could be observed. When employees know that their driving habits are monitored, they comply more readily with cost-effective driving policies and increase productivity.
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