Anyone have a driver? - advice needed

[Liquorice]

Hi, we're hiring a driver. A local one rather than a DH. Starting the interviews this weekend.

My concern is that the driver will have few driving duties to start off with. When my son starts kindergarten in August he'll need to drive him there and pick him up each day, but before then he'll only be driving one or two trips a day a couple of days a week.

We're going to hire someone who will also walk our dogs and water the garden etc., but that will only take up a couple of hours a day.

Surely other people with family drivers are in the same position - i.e. can't occupy their drivers all the time. What do you do about it? Do they just hang around the house? Or do you let them go off and do what they want provided they are on the end of a phone? If they have a lot of down time, do they get disheartened and start really disliking the job?

I'm tempted to be more flexible with hours and give time off if he's genuinely got nothing to do, but my husband feels we are paying a good salary so he must be "on standby" or doing something all the time. What do other people do?

Would really appreciate any ideas of what other people do as we've never employed anyone in this capacity before. Thanks.

 

[mummymoo]

Liquorice, we have a local driver and yes they do have A LOT of down time but we are on HK Island and they do expect to have A LOT of down time otherwise they leave. All mine have been paid an above average salary.
My driver just snoozes in the car, reads the newspaper or surfs his phone between picking my children up and the occasional grocery trip with the domestic helpers. He sometimes runs errands like drop off dry cleaning, buys sticky tape, pencils for the children ect. He has around 1.5-2 hours off for lunch. He also washes the car almost daily (but I don't really want him to do this as I don't care about it - but I've left it up to him).
I wouldn't really let him go off if you don't need him as we had a driver in the past that we did this with (let him come in at 9am instead of the agreed 8am as my daughter hadn't started nursery yet, we hired him 6 months before she started) and he just became very unhappy when we wanted him to go back to his 'usual' hours. Kept trying to get saturday arvos off as pay back for having to come in earlier which really upset me. I think you'll find you are already asking him to do quite a lot with walking the dogs and the garden.
I find domestic staff, drivers, helpers ect and their management one of the most challenging aspects of my life in HK. Drivers in particular are (for me) particularly difficult to manage.