A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
Development Director at Brake
Getting the Most from Your Road Risk Management Programme
Caroline Perry
All organizations that have employees who drive for work purposes have a responsibility to manage the safety of their fleet. Whatever the size of your organization or the budget you have, there are many measures you can implement to address your road risk, from those that are simple to those that are complex.
Yet once a fleet safety program is in place, we find many organizations are not using those measures as effectively as they could. Below are some of the common things that organizations can do to improve the effectiveness of a fleet safety program and help to reduce risk:
Using Data Effectively
If you use a telematics/GPS system, it may provide you with substantial data and metrics about your drivers and vehicles. You may also have data from your leasing company, insurer, or other fleet management systems. But how are you using that data to manage your road risk?
Often companies put systems in place and collect the data but don’t then take the next step and use it to target interventions to help reduce their road risk. Some steps you can take to help you use data effectively include:
Talking to your suppliers about how they can provide data and reports to you. Can they make it easy for you to identify individual vehicles and drivers and their associated risk? Can they pull out trends for you?
Ensuring you can identify who was driving a specific vehicle at the time of an incident, over-speed event, etc. If you have a pool or shared vehicles, ensure it's easy to match your booking system with data from any systems or reports you receive.
Use your data to identify trends with your incidents, near misses, and other metrics. E.g., which of your drivers are high, medium, and low risk, whether there are particular routes where collisions, near misses, or other incidents (such as over-speed events) occur, whether there are particular times of day where collisions, near misses or other incidents occur.
Using the trends you identify to target interventions. For example, implementing measures to reward good driving and address poor driving with individual drivers or looking at possible changes to journey routes and schedules to avoid places where incidents are more likely to occur.
If you use a telematics/GPS system, it may provide you with substantial data and metrics about your drivers and vehicles
Fleet Safety Policies
Whether standalone or incorporated into your health & safety policy, having a fleet safety policy is a key first step to addressing your road risk. This should set out what your organization will do to address safety and who has responsibility for it, including senior management, managers/supervisors, and drivers.
As well as having the policy in place, it’s important to review and update it regularly in line with any changes to your fleet program. For example, if you are implementing technology such as telematics or in-vehicle cameras, you may need to update your policies to reflect this, including what data will be collected and how it is used.
Rewarding Good Drivers
Many organizations have put measures in place to identify and address poor driving behavior, but sometimes forget that there are also benefits to rewarding good driving. Some organizations use competitions or gamification to help incentivize drivers, for example rewarding the top drives each quarter with a gift voucher or rewarding teams that have no over-speeds in a monthly period with a morning tea.
Where organizations are implementing a range of measures to address safety and using those to the best effect, many are seeing convincing results, reducing the number of incidents and costs involved and, most importantly, helping to save lives and reduce injuries on our roads.
