It should come as no surprise that drivers prioritize the best pay possible, but another avenue to keep them could be much cheaper —  earn their trust.

In a survey of more than 15,000 drivers, Stay Metrics found that while pay and compensation are the areas that drivers considered the most when deciding to stay with a carrier, trust was also a significant factor in potential turnover.

Stay Metrics asked drivers questions about their satisfaction with key elements of their jobs. Questions touched on issues like fairness of compensation, work related stress and whether or not they felt their employers had their best interests in mind.

Drivers were also asked if they had considered leaving their carrier.  Stay Metrics then looked at how much the topics correlated to their intent to leave giving it a score to show how likely each issue was to influence turnover.

Pay and compensation were consistently near the most influential on decisions to leave. But Stay Metrics found that trust in a carrier was nearly as important to retention.

“The pay questions with the highest Stay Index have less to do with the amount and more to do with transparency and fairness,” said Tim Hindes, co-founder and chief executive officer of Stay Metrics. “But that’s not the whole story. Drivers’ attitudes towards the trustworthiness of their carriers seem just as important. In situations where pay increases are not possible and drivers are dissatisfied, we recommend carriers focus on strategies to build back driver trust.”

While driver pay can be a harder issue to solve for some fleets, Stay Metrics said in its report that there was a significant opportunity to improve or restore trust between drivers and carriers in areas that didn’t require a change in compensation. These includes actions like a carrier doing what it says it is going to do or simply a fostering a feeling that a carrier cares about the driver.

Slightly less influential, but still an avenue for turnover prevention, were work related issues like stress, communication and upward mobility within the company. This included the strain that truck driving could put on family life.

So what should fleets takeaway from this information? Stay Metrics thinks that first and foremost, carriers need to pay attention to pay, focusing not just how much drivers are paid, but how they are paid. Secondly, carriers can do more to create a driver-centric culture to improve trust among drivers. And lastly, fleets should look into ways to mitigate stress and improve a driver’s ability to handle it.

For a deeper dive, the report and its findings are available for free on the Stay Metrics website.