Integrating Driver Experience into Health and Well-Being Decision-Making for the Trucking Industry

Driving a truck is a demanding job physically, emotionally, and mentally that too often leads to chronic disease, loneliness, and financial hardship. This can result in accidents and high turnover. Pandemic supply chain issues illuminated how trucking drives everything in our economy and lives. Without trucking, there is nothing. While the transportation industry has made tremendous strides in reducing risk and improving safety for drivers over the years, challenges remain with balancing job responsibilities, mitigating risk, and achieving a high quality of life to sustain this essential workforce.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on how the trucking industry can transform its approach to address the critical issue of driver health and well-being. We will share how voice of the driver and driver experience can be elevated and then integrated into decision-making using Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD). EBCD uses methodologies across four phases that enable innovation teams to collaborate with all partners in a given ecosystem in developing equitable solutions and resolving issues as they emerge in real-time.

For this project, we will share how we learned directly from co-designers – drivers, supporting partners, and industry experts – in the Discovery phase about the various factors impacting their health and well-being. The session will discuss how co-designers engaged in this journey, shared different perspectives, and discussed ways to improve the driver experience both on and off the road for health, safety, and well-being. The findings from this journey, aimed at helping transportation companies navigate the health and well-being of their driver workforce, will be presented during this panel session & you won’t want to miss out on the recommendations! Be a part of this collaborative effort to revolutionize the trucking industry and prioritize the health and happiness of our drivers.

Session Objective: At the end of the session, participants will be able to: 

• Summarize how Experience-Based Co-Design can engage all levels of partners in an ecosystem to solve wicked problems.
• Describe the top 3 most common health and well-being challenges among truck drivers.
• Analyze recommendations generated by the project for implementation to improve health and well-being for the transportation industry.