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Bad driving is the bane of anyone involved in haulage work. And while most drivers are professional and safe on the road, it only takes one or two to rack up hefty costs to a company’s funds and reputation. Luckily, there are ways to solve the problem, and managers can play a crucial role in maintaining high standards. The following tips offer a helpful guide on how you can banish bad driving for good within your firm. The Risks Recent surveys show as many as 87% of drivers engage in at least one risky behaviour in a month. This can mean anything from driving aggressively or zoning out to texting whilst at the wheel. These behaviours can seriously increase risks to any road users, including those doing haulage work. The following statistics give some pause for thought: • Collisions related to aggressive driving increased 400% since 1990, to over 13,000 a year. • Texting while operating a vehicle increases your risk of a collision by 800%. • Up to 25,000 injuries and deaths each year are related to texting at the wheel. Sobering stuff, and a reminder of just how important good management can be. Hiring It seems obvious, but one of the simplest ways to avoid bad driving is to prioritise safety when taking on employees. As well as checking insurance and driving history and performing basic background checks, firms can also benefit from putting applicants through preliminary driving tests. In addition to giving you reliable data, this lets you assess how well prospective workers will deal with the demands of the job. Any time and labour costs will pay for themselves in savings: safe driving massively reduces the potential for costly legal fees, and fewer collisions will help bring down company-wide insurance premiums. Coaching With good standards established at hiring, it’s crucial to maintain them in the long term. Frequent coaching enables employees to keep on top of new regulations without having to seek them out on their own time. There are plenty of training programmes to choose from, so managers needn’t worry about the costs of developing their own. Pick one that’s tailored to the type of haulage work your firm specialises in, and get moving. Gathering Data Of course, all this screening and training is worthless if drivers aren’t meeting standards on the road. Most can be trusted, not least because they have strong incentives to avoid collisions. But it’s always better to have complete datasets. Telematics, for instance, can provide accurate information on drivers’ acceleration, braking and more. Haulage work can produce a lot of data, though, so it’s crucial managers use it correctly. Start with a weekly or monthly average for relevant metrics and go from there. Look for trends and compare these to your starting-point to identify problem areas. Fine-grained analysis enables you to spot which drivers make more mistakes and what mistakes they make. You can then use this information to target training and other interventions, preventing small problems from becoming big ones. All in all, there’s a lot managers can do to ensure safety in haulage work. Even better, each of these tips reinforces the others. Having good data, for instance, can help you identify potential problem areas to screen for at hiring and train employees to avoid. The more information you have, the more you can tweak – and the more you can make your business as safe and profitable as possible. Author Plate Norman Dulwich is a Correspondent for Haulage Exchange, the leading online trade network for the road transport industry. Connecting logistics professionals across the UK and Europe through their website, Haulage Exchange provides services for matching haulage work with available drivers. Over 5,400 member companies are networked together through the Exchange to fill empty capacity, get new clients and form long-lasting business relationships.
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