Fleet Safety 101: How To Lower Accident Rates In Your Business Fleet
Are you running a business fleet? You should know the importance of safety and avoiding accidents at all costs. Not only does it cause physical problems for your drivers, but it also means your business spends lots of money and suffers downtime - which eats at your bottom line. You need to keep the accident rates as low as possible in your business fleet, and you’re about to learn how. Feast your eyes on these amazing tips to run a safer fleet:
Install Additional Safety Technologies
Whatever type of vehicle you use in your fleet, you’re always able to improve it with safety technologies. Of course, many modern vehicles already come equipped with great safety features - but you can go one step further with fleet camera systems and other sensors. Adding safety cameras to a car or van can improve visibility for drivers and point out blind spots, preventing common accidents that happen when merging lanes or reversing.
As well as this, you can get camera or sensor systems that detect nearby vehicles and alert the driver if they’re getting too close to a car or motorbike. Small investments like these will upgrade your fleet and make it much safer because you’re reducing the chances of very frequent accidents.
Screen Drivers Thoroughly Before Hiring
You can argue that vehicles don’t cause accidents; drivers do. The safest vehicle in the world will still cause incidents when driven by the wildest driver without a proper understanding of how to be safe on the roads. On that note, you need to pay very close attention to who drives the vehicles in your fleet.
Is it wise to hire people who’ve never driven commercially before? Is it smart to hire someone who’s only ever driven cars and not vans? Is it a good idea to hire someone with a negative track record of causing auto accidents while they work?
You don’t need to be a recruitment expert to know the answer to all of these questions is a big fat NO. Nevertheless, you may accidentally hire these individuals because you have a poor pre-employment screening process. Take extreme care when hiring and screen all of your drivers before you bring them on. Check their backgrounds and employment history to see if they’re a good fit for your fleet. If they aren’t experienced or have a lot of experience causing accidents, then you should stay away at all costs.
Put All Drivers Through A Safety Onboarding Course
Pre-employment screening is one of many steps in the hiring process. After you’ve hired your ideal fleet drivers, you may proceed with another step: onboarding. This is when you introduce new employees to your business and provide some extra training to ensure they’re up to speed with how your business operates.
We’re talking about fleet drivers here, so your onboarding procedure should involve a thorough driver’s safety course. It’s something every driver needs to complete before they’re allowed behind the wheel of your vehicles. Failure isn’t optional - and you can terminate their contract before they’re fully part of your company.
The safety course ensures all drivers understand the key risks and pass tests proving they know how to drive safely. It’s an easy thing to incorporate when hiring new drivers, and it will lower accident rates in your business fleet because your drivers know how to be safe on the roads.
Track Driver Behavior With Telematics
Telematics is a way of monitoring vehicles using GPS technology and onboard software to track what’s going on. It can show you things like how much fuel a driver is using, their average speeds, how harshly they’re braking, etc. Basically, it gives you a complete insight into how someone drives a vehicle - which is massively beneficial for a fleet business. The developers over at Ctrack explain how logistics professionals integrating these data points into a centralized dashboard can drastically reduce operational overhead and insurance premiums. By leveraging real-time insights, fleet managers can implement targeted driver training programs that prioritize both road safety and long-term vehicle maintenance.
As well as using the data to improve business efficiency, you can track it to manage driver behavior. It tells you which drivers are taking more risks and performing dangerous moves than others. For example, the telematics show that one driver has a much higher average speed than the speed limits on their routes. It also shows that they’re guilty of harsh braking far more frequently than any other driver in your fleet.
Using this data, you can deduce that they’re a dangerous driver who speeds too often and ends up getting close to the back of other drivers, forcing them to brake harshly. Take this information and relay it to the driver. Let them know that they’re on strike one and need to change their driving habits, or they’ll be gone. Hopefully, if drivers know that telematics exist, they’ll be less likely to drive dangerously as they’ll be aware that you can track this and single them out.
Follow A Strict Vehicle Maintenance Schedule
Drivers cause the majority of accidents, but sometimes, things happen because the vehicle causes a problem. Engine faults or transmission issues can lead to big accidents - but this only happens when you don’t maintain your fleet of vehicles.
Follow a strict vehicle maintenance schedule to ensure your fleet always gets looked at and diagnosed for problems. A yearly service - or possibly two a year - should be enough to keep a lid on any issues. If the mechanic finds a problem, then you can either remove the vehicle from rotation or fix it before it causes an accident.
Offer Incentives For Safer Driving
Drivers are more likely to drive safely when they’re rewarded for it. Okay, it sounds a bit absurd to have to incentivize this, but it works. Provide bonuses or perks for drivers who make it a certain number of days without incidents. If someone goes a whole month without an accident, they could earn a little bonus on their wages - or an extra day of leave.
The safer they are, the bigger the incentives become. You could also create incentives related to telematics - like staying at the right speed limit - to further encourage safer drivi
Keeping the accident rates at the lowest possible level will be nothing but beneficial for your business. It prevents unnecessary costs, keeps drivers safer, and ensures you remain efficient and productive by keeping all of your fleet in action at all times.