Are your drivers taking appropriate breaks from time behind the wheel?
In New Zealand, the Transport Agency suggests that In general, drivers must take a break of at least 30 minutes after 5.5 hours of work time. In Australia, commercial drivers must rest for 15 continuous minutes after 5.25 hours of work time. In the United Kingdom, commercial drivers are required to take a 45 minute rest break after a maximum of 4.5 hours behind the wheel.
In general, these work time requirements apply to anyone legally required to manage driving hours, including transport service operators and drivers, or organizations that employ or contract drivers and transport logistics companies.
The required rest periods of each geography differ slightly, but the requirements serve the same purpose - to help reduce the risks of driver fatigue and a potential incident.
Utilize automated breaks with vWork
Ensuring drivers are taking breaks when required is a challenge for most fleet managers.
With this in mind, we recently launched Automated Breaks that works with our Route Optimization feature. Automated Breaks enables all workers' breaks to be scheduled and incorporated into an optimized route to maximize both worker and fleet efficiency.
The benefits of automated breaks
- Jobs and worker breaks are scheduled within a single optimization, simplifying the optimization process and making the overall optimization more efficient. This is especially beneficial when job durations are long as it ensures employees get their breaks without compromising on the volume of jobs they can complete.
- You can spread your workers’ break times over a specified time ensuring your workers are not all on a break at the same time.
- Workers are prompted to take breaks through the mobile app. This helps your organization meet employment law obligations and take care of employees’ welfare.
- It accurately records the time spent on employee breaks for reporting and audit purposes.
How it works
Automated Breaks combines the use of a special Break Job, a Break Tag, and a time window to schedule a worker’s break in an optimization. A Break job is different from regular jobs included in route optimizations in that it does not include a geocoded step.
To set up Automated Breaks you must have the Health and Safety feature enabled in vWork. Contact your vWork account manager or email support@vworkapp.com if you need a hand with this.
See Schedule worker breaks in Route Optimization with Automated Breaks
