Employees will often cite the pressure to perform as a reason for their cutting corners at work. This puts the spotlight on you (as an employer), painting a picture where your concern is only for your bottom line rather than the well-being of your workforce and the integrity of your services. While it may be true that you expect employees to perform at a certain level, your expectations need not always be misconstrued as pressure to accomplish tasks no matter the costs.
As a provider of trucking and/or transportation services, you have an obligation to your clients to complete routes within a reasonable amount of time. That depends largely on your drivers, who you know need to balance the safe operation of their vehicles with the need to get to where they are going on time. If one of your drivers happens to be driving at excessive speeds and causes an accident, it might be very easy for them to claim they were only speeding to meet your performance demands.
It is perfectly reasonable for you to place expectations on your drivers, yet not ones that would require them to bypass safety measures in order to meet. Section 392.6 of the Code of Federal Regulations states that you cannot impose route times on commercial vehicle drivers that would require them to drive in excess of the posted speed limits in the areas that those routes traverse. While placing a standard on you, this statute might also absolve you if the matter of performance pressure ever comes up.
If, after evaluating your expected route time, it is shown that your driver would not need to speed through an area in order to complete the route within that time frame, a claim that you pressured them into speeding would be proven baseless.
