December 3rd, 2024 | Sterling

Paving the Way to Hiring Efficiencies: The Need to Effectively Manage Your Non-Regulated Employees

In our last blog post from our series on hiring and maintaining compliance for drivers, we discussed how you can effectively keep track of your drivers and protect your significant workforce investments by leveraging monitoring and training solutions.

Now let’s slightly shift our focus to your non-regulated workers who support your regulated drivers — after all, they’re important to both the operational success of your business and to the safety of the workplace. US employers lose over $150 billion each year and 75,000,000 days of work due to workplace accidents. In this blog, we’ll share just how important it is to include record-keeping of your non-regulated roles, also using MVR monitoring for these workers, and helpful ways to keep your drug and health programs optimized for this population to reduce the likelihood of workplace incidents and improve cost savings.

Before we dive in, remember that you may need to review or update your company’s policies to accommodate these changes. That’s why it’s always good practice to review policy documents as your first step when looking to make organizational changes.

Record-Keeping

Concerning their regulated drivers, companies generally have robust and established processes to ensure their drivers are compliant, not only with the items specific to regulations, but also with their company policy. However, we have found that many organizations, without the regulatory requirements, have a less efficient process for their non-regulated drivers.

For example, organizations may attempt to shoehorn a process into their systems such as their HRIS, which can cause several problems. For instance, an HRIS system isn’t meant to track items such as license status, or whether a driver has a valid insurance meeting company standards. Additionally, access levels are an added concern, since your fleet and safety teams often don’t have the right levels of access (which can be tricky to obtain permission) and require teams to bounce between two systems to check on all employees they are responsible for.

Our solution here is to utilize your DQF platform to store records for all your non-regulated and regulated drivers. The DQ system is designed to capture this information accurately, and is also highly configurable so that you not only have different protocols for non-regulated vs regulated drivers, but you also have all of the specific job requirements of your employees.

MVR Monitoring

In our last blog post, we reviewed the steps you can take to manage risk on drivers via MVR monitoring, telematics, and training. While these are largely geared to your regulated driving population, the benefits also extend to all those who either drive company vehicles or their own personal vehicles during business hours. When organizations implement these risk management methods, we see on average a 9% reduction in claims across the board and a 77% reduction in monthly violations.

For more specifics, check out our blog post on managing driver risk.

Drug Testing

Random Drug Testing Program

DOT-regulated employees are subject to random drug or alcohol testing for the following situations throughout their tenure with a company:

• Pre-employment
• Reasonable suspicion/cause
• Random
• Return-to-duty, follow-up, and/or post-accident

Employers should strongly consider implementing a similar program for their non-regulated employees as well, as a random program has been shown to:

• Deter drug and alcohol usage in the workplace
• Reduce absenteeism
• Increase productivity
• Reduce employer liability — mitigates risk
• Reduce healthcare costs
• Safer workplace with reduced accidents

So what should employers consider when developing a random program?

• Selections should be made by a scientifically valid method: typically a computer-based random generator
• Tests should be unannounced and spread evenly throughout the year
• Once notified, employees should proceed immediately to the testing location
• Adjust testing to fit your third-shift employees, i.e. determine a collection site that’s open after hours
• Maintain good documentation (results and paperwork)

Third-Shift Testing Program

One of the most common problems we hear from employers considering implementing a drug testing program is the lack of an efficient solution for third-shift regulated and unregulated employees for post-accident and reasonable suspicion. Reasons for this include:

• Cost
• Not fail-safe (i.e. collection site may be too busy)
• Long wait periods
• Onsite managers may be unfamiliar with a third-shift testing program
• Clinics’ lack of availability and/or proximity

But given the benefits outlined above, we encourage employers to adopt a drug testing program for their third-shift unregulated employees. Due to the complexities involved with this type of program, we recommend the following options as a solution for third-shift unregulated employees:

• Instant drug test kits
• These can be confirmed in the event of a non-negative result
• Most employers are comfortable with an oral fluid testing option, such as OralTox
• Lab-based oral fluids testing
• Self-collected by employee
• Employer can observe and complete Chain of Custody Form (CCF)
• Detects recent drug use
• Provides observed, tamper-resistant collections
• Saves wait time and collector costs
• Faster lab turnaround times
• Reliable as urine
• As DOT moves forward with beginning oral fluids testing, more on-site collectors will also be able to collect these products if the employer prefers that model

Conclusion

On average, American employers lose over $1,000 per worker everyday due to workplace accidents, and even more in employee populations who build, create, and move things. True, you may never be able to prevent all workplace incidents. However, by implementing the basic solutions listed above for your non-regulated workers, you can significantly mitigate the occurrences within your organization and continue building a workplace of trust and safety.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to seeing you for our next edition, where we will give updates on DOT Regulated Oral Fluid Drug Testing.

For questions on the above topic, or to connect with Sterling, reach out to us.

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