With a blast of wild weather hitting much of New Zealand and strong winds of up to 120km/h, driving conditions at this time of year are particularly hazardous.
While safe driving is a year-round habit, winter driving demands special care, extreme caution, and most importantly ongoing coaching. It’s the ideal time to be more proactive, rather than waiting for something bad to occur and dealing with the negative consequences.
Understanding where the risks lie
It’s important to be aware of your duty of care as a fleet operator, which involves a lot of health and safety compliance, as well as risk identification. From driver fatigue and risky distracted driving behaviours to poor road conditions, there has always been specific danger behind the wheel. The social cost of a fatal crash, a figure looking at the impacts of a crash on drivers and their families, was estimated to be $4.4 billion in 2020. But the true cost of lives being destroyed, and the ongoing trauma drivers carry is far greater than that.
The key to the prevention of road deaths is training drivers to anticipate potential hazards, especially when driving in inclement weather. What if there’s not enough space between your vehicle and the vehicle ahead of you? What if your driver enters a busy highway and fails to spot a work zone warning sign? More often than not, it is down to how we drive to ensure safety for ourselves and other road users. With more knowledge of safe driving practices, your drivers can have better control of the situation.
Even for skilled and experienced drivers, being able to perceive risk, rather than averting an impending crash, requires not just years of experience but also using all of their mental capacity. It’s a discipline that only gets better with comprehensive training. In safety-first fleet companies, managers fully understand that it’s their duty to equip their drivers with necessary education and coaching to maintain safe driving habits.
Developing a safety programme that sticks
Gone are the days of drivers trucking along with no ongoing coaching. The advent of telematics systems has vastly improved the way fleet companies conduct driver training. While it might not be practical for a fleet manager to sit next to every driver to monitor their driving, regular one-on-one meetings with your staff to discuss positive driving behaviour can go a long way. Telematics provides insightful data on driver behaviour thanks to reports and automatic monitoring of unsafe practices, allowing firms to develop personalised, targeted curriculum to suit each driver’s behaviour.
Communicating effectively across your team is also a crucial part of driver coaching. If you provide drivers with vague remarks and no evidence, you run the risk of not being taken seriously. Even professional drivers can be surprised when they see what their driving looks like. With meaningful analytics, fleet managers can generate in-depth, productive on-road assessments in no time. Safety analytics reports like driver scorecard, harsh event reporting and speed violation can establish a very good baseline for data-based driver performance evaluation. Using a combination of telematics data, advanced on-board sensors, and AI, Teletrac Navman’s smart dashcam is also useful when it comes to monitoring unsafe driving behaviour.
Although face-to-face coaching remains popular, remote, real-time coaching methods have been on the rise as it proves to be effective at fixing unsafe driver behaviour immediately through in-vehicle alerts. The behavioural learning system notifies drivers when they display dangerous actions, like using their mobile phones, exceeding a speed limit, or harsh braking. Spotting these traits early before they turn into habits is the first step to improving driver safety and raising awareness of areas that need improvement.
Last but not least, the truth is some drivers have big egos, so why not work it to your advantage by motivating them through a game? Encourage your entire team to level up their performances by stirring up a friendly competition. Driver scorecards are a straight-forward way to introduce gamification into your fleet company. In-vehicle telematics can create a scorecard for each driver across key metrics, and drivers can view their scores on a dashboard and compare their performance with other drivers. You can provide rewards for extra motivation (think free lunch, restaurant vouchers, a day off), or training to help drivers climb up the rankings. The best thing about seemingly simple stats comparisons is that it breeds real-world improvements.
We can’t change our roads overnight, but we can change our driving habits. By utilising GPS technology and making ongoing driver coaching a priority, you can keep your fleet up and running the way it should be all year round.
*Michael Barnard is a transport solutions specialist at Teletrac Navman. This column appeared in the August edition of TransportTalk.
