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How To Build a Fleet Safety Program for Your Small or Mid-Size Business That Reduces Costs and Saves Lives

Small and medium-sized companies face a host of challenges in today’s rapidly changing business landscape. If your company depends on mobile employees, there’s even more complexity to manage and need for a fleet safety program.

Your workers are on the road every day serving customers – or scattered across a variety of job sites – so how do you ensure their safety? They’re depending on you, and so is the health and profitability of your business. While you can’t physically lay eyes on them, you’ve got to know where they are and how they’re doing.

According to Automotive Fleet, the annual accident rate for commercial fleets has reached 20%. And when an accident occurs, its cost ranks near the top of the list of most expensive injury claims a business will face, at an average of $70,000 per occurrence – double the average rate of a work injury.
Even with a small fleet, an accident can have a devastating effect on your team and your business.

Defining a Holistic Safety Program to Keep Your Drivers Safe and Improve Operational Efficiency

And, as important as it is, preventing accidents is just one component of an effective safety program. The risk to your employees starts before they get behind the wheel and extends to the very end of their shift. It begins with pre-trip inspections, includes vehicle maintenance protocols and proactive alerts, carries through on-the-road driving behavior and incidents.

When you address the full spectrum of actions and events that contribute to risk, you can reduce accidents and injuries, increase productivity, lower your operating costs (including things like fuel spend, insurance premiums and legal payouts) and cut the unplanned downtime that takes a toll on your profitability and your ability to serve customers.

By looking at safety from a holistic perspective, you’ll be able to measure how risky behaviors reduce your operational efficiency. A comprehensive safety program will show you, for example, how rapid acceleration and harsh braking negatively impact your safety metrics and drive up your fuel spend and lead to excessive wear and tear on your vehicles – and identify the coaching and training necessary to drive improvement.

When you go a step further, using technology to gain in-cab visibility and coaching while your drivers are behind the wheel, you can reduce accidents, cut insurance costs have hard data to exonerate drivers against false claims. This is critically important since FleetOwner estimates that 80% of the incidents routinely blamed on commercial drivers are not their fault.

Six Steps to Creating an Effective Safety Program for Your Small or Mid-Size Business

When you have the right combination of integrated telematics and in-cab safety technologies in place – along with effective safety protocols – you’ll operate more efficiently, safeguard your employees and ensure customer expectations are met – or even exceeded.

To help you learn more about how effective fleet management translates to better safety, we’ve prepared a short eBook entitled, How to Build a Fleet Safety Program for Your Small or Mid-Size Business. We cover real-time visibility on driver performance, how to measure safety and related goals using KPIs, as well as tips on getting the most from your fleet management safety program.

You’ll learn:

  • How to define and communicate an effective company-wide safety program.
  • Strategies and tools to gain full visibility when your drivers are on the road – so you can proactively identify risky behaviors and take coaching action to improve your safety metrics.
  • Tips for using gamification to engage your drivers in hitting safety goals.
  • How digitizing paper-based inspections can reduce downtime through increased accountability and faster reporting.
  • Why connecting safety and compliance to your operational processes is critical to improving efficiency, productivity and profitability.
  • How to establish KPIs and track continuous improvement against your metrics.

Take action to improve your safety program today. Download the guide.