
Nominations for the Best Fleets to Drive For program have settled back to pre-Covid levels, with 118 fleet nominations and 62 finalists named this year, on par with last year and those that preceded the post-pandemic boom.
Many of this year’s nominees are new to the program, and represent some segments such as tanker, which have been underrepresented in the past. The winners will be named Jan. 28, but TruckNews.com sat down ahead of the announcement with Mark Murrell, co-owner of CarriersEdge, the program’s creators and administrators, to gain some insights into trends seen during this year’s vetting process.

In short, Best Fleets aims to recognize for-hire trucking companies that create the best workplaces for professional drivers. Drivers nominate their carrier to kickstart the rigorous evaluation and judging process that follows.
Spending less on orientation
Trucking has endured a two-year-long recession, and carriers are cutting costs where they can. Murrell said this was particularly seen in orientation programs for new hires. During the post-Covid boom, Murrell said carriers were offering unprecedented compensation for new hires to attend orientation.
“Fleets were paying, like, $500 a day for drivers to be in orientation,” he said of that time. “That was not really sustainable. This year it has dropped. They’re really paying less for orientation and they’re hiring fewer drivers.”
Best Fleet judges have also seen carriers scale back on investments made in their finishing programs.
“They’re not as desperate to bring in drivers at the moment, so they are scaling back the number of people they’re putting through their programs,” Murrell said.
Better maintenance planning
Companies in the Best Fleets program are doing a much better job at planning maintenance activities to minimize disruption to drivers’ lives. Judges ask what, specifically, fleets are doing in their maintenance programs to benefit drivers.
“What is the downtime for the driver when maintenance happens?” is one of the questions Murrell relayed. “How long is the driver out of commission? Is that maintenance getting done when the driver is off-duty or at home? Or is the driver sitting around the terminal waiting for it to be done, losing miles?”
Best Fleets are taking more steps to schedule maintenance around a driver’s off-duty time, or providing some other contingency – such as a loaner truck – so they can stay active and generating income while work is performed on their regular ride.
“Sometimes they’ll put a driver on a local route [while the maintenance is performed]. Sometimes they have spare trucks. Sometimes they will just pay them for their time. There’s a variety of things that they’re doing, but it’s become pretty standard that the driver essentially has no disruption when maintenance needs to happen,” Murrell said.
Judges have begun asking fleets to report the percentage of their maintenance that’s unplanned, noting unplanned downtime can be disruptive to a driver.
“And what was interesting is, the number of fleets that really don’t track that,” Murrell found. “Among the people that were measuring it, it could be anywhere from 1% to 40% [unplanned], which is a massive range. So, that’s something we’re going to be watching for over the next few years to see what happens.”

New tech becomes the norm
What were once new technologies in use by a handful of progressive fleets have since become ubiquitous, Murrell noted, naming dash cams in particular.
“There are several things we have been watching for a few years that were emerging and beginning to be more common, and now pretty much everybody is doing them,” he said. “Pretty much everybody has got cameras. They’re standard now.”
Of the Best Fleet finalists, 92% are using dash cams, Murrell noted, mostly road-facing cameras.
Carriers are also using in-cab tech to provide drivers with benchmarking tools so they can compare their driving performance to others within the fleet.
“That has also become standard because pretty much everybody has got an advanced ELD-type system that includes telematics and tracks all of that information,” Murrell said.
Good, old-fashioned communication also receives more emphasis; it’s an inexpensive way to raise and maintain driver morale.
“For years it was just, ‘Well, we’ve got an open-door policy. Drivers can ask us any questions or tell us if there’s a problem.’ Then we started to see people were starting to do surveys,” Murrell related. “And this year, pretty much everybody has got some proactive method of getting feedback from drivers.”
Collecting feedback is one thing, but the best of the Best Fleets take that feedback and act on it, forming specialized committees to address issues that arise.
Compensation, driver satisfaction flat
Driver compensation rates were nearly completely flat from the previous year, Murrell noted, while average miles climbed slightly. Fleets took measures to keep their best drivers busy, while parking trucks or cutting loose poorer performing drivers.
Driver satisfaction rates were also steady, with an average score of 89%.
“Usually, when things are dark, the satisfaction rate goes up because people are suddenly happier to have jobs,” Murrell noted. “A few years ago when things were booming and drivers were able to jump from fleet to fleet, satisfaction rates were actually down.”
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