The end of the year can be a joyful time and this year , after the lockdowns of the past two years , may be extra cause for celebration . But for many , that is not the case .

While loneliness or the pressures of the holiday season are common challenges , anyone who drives for work , including professional truck drivers , face stress , burnout and other mental health challenges , driven by increased traffic congestion and non-negotiable deadlines that must be met within a limited time period .

And , as Safety Risk expert Keith Govias is commonly hearing , the pandemic has had an even more severe effect on Transport and Logistics . For example , with sustained increases in online shopping increasing demands on drivers for deliveries . Those pressures flow through businesses , with schedulers and others working in administration scrambling to meet demand , and managers and owners trying to keep businesses operating in uncertain times .

Keith will deliver NRSPP ’ s December webinar , Coping as a business and supporting mental health during the holiday season , to examine the issues that impact worker mental health and business resilience across the Christmas and New Year periods .

He has also expanded on these issues in this Thought Leadership piece – End-of-year opportunity : Building mental health and the resilience of your people and business – providing practical and easy-to-implement strategies to help address those challenges in the short-term and help build more resilient people and businesses for the long-term .

“ Drivers might feel anxiety leading up to having time off over the Christmas period , having to see family or dealing with a degree of absence and loneliness if you don ’ t have family or friends to share the Christmas-New Year period with ,” Keith said , “ or if you are embedded in a lifestyle of loneliness as a long-haul truck driver , that might be quite challenging for you .

“ Our clients in Transport and Logistics are telling us that they never got the same break as other businesses did when they went into lockdown – in actual fact , they went into hyperdrive . That a number of their ancillary services , especially local direct freight , have increased significantly with a lot more users moving to online shopping and extra parcel movement that ’ s been going on .

“ And that a lot of the teams are especially burning out in the admin space – with the impacts of Covid and people being on leave or being isolated at home , they haven ’ t had the skill sets necessarily to cover .

6 ISSUE 38 DECEMBER 2022 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU

FleetDrive 38 - December 2022 | Page 6

TURNING THE END-OF-YEAR RUSH INTO A POSITIVE – FOR YOUR PEOPLE AND YOUR BUSINESS

The end of the year can be a joyful time and this year , after the lockdowns of the past two years , may be extra cause for celebration . But for many , that is not the case .