Safety is an integral piece to being successful at your organization. This was especially true in 2020 and will continue to be so in 2021 and beyond. The safety of your drivers and operators as well as the public is at stake every day. With hundreds or even thousands of vehicles and assets to protect and manage, you have got to run an operation that’s safe, efficient and connected.
Your drivers are your most important asset, more so than any vehicle or equipment. As a manager, you have the responsibility to invest in their lives, livelihood, wellbeing and enhance their ability to be productive.
To have a strong business, you need to have an end-to-end safety program that can provide meaningful insights to help you create better accountability, fewer collisions and liabilities, and reduced operational expenditures.
Where Do You Begin?
Managers need to have a clear understanding of what safety means to their organization. An effective safety program needs to be comprehensive, up–to–date and the commitment has to start at the top. Once you have leadership’s support of the program, that provide you and your safety program the support it needs.
From a manager standpoint, think about how your goals and how your team currently stacks up. What more might you need to help you achieve your 2021 safety goals? How are you looking to strategically roll out new safety and accountability initiatives to your drivers? In which areas of safety and compliance are there accountability gaps?
Safety is not just one aspect — it doesn’t stop and start with how a driver is driving. It ranges all the way from screening drivers, training drivers, preventing accidents, ensuring inspection compliance, and proactive repair and maintenance.
A solution that provides you the ability to manage all of this in one platform and that provides you the full picture will make a huge difference to not only the lives of your drivers but also to your day-to-day, your KPIs and, ultimately, your company’s profit. Imagine getting insights on how your safety, inspection and maintenance processes correlate and affect one another. These insights give you the ability to make more efficient and profitable decisions (and you’ll be able to measure improvements).
Safety is Holistic: It Starts and Ends Outside the Vehicle
Safety isn’t confined to a department, or any one person’s title. It’s not limited to a written policy or a set of tasks. It impacts every part of your operation. In order to generate measurable results in efficiency and profit, take a proactive and holistic approach to safety.
Safety is a full-time job. From distracted behavior to unexpected hazards, you need to have comprehensive, real-time visibility to keep your drivers and business safe. This full-time job can really be beneficial with integration and automation.
You can’t operate without your drivers and vehicles. That is why it’s imperative to have proper safety protocols in place. Think about this: with historical driver data, you’ll know if a triggered event is a one-off incident, an ongoing pattern of risky behavior or a company-wide driver behavior culture. As a manager, it’s the exact insight you need to coach your team to success.
Behind-the-wheel safety is always top of mind, but safety starts before anyone gets behind the wheel and extends beyond when the driver turns off the ignition. Having all aspects of your safety and compliance initiatives integrated into one, user-friendly platform will make the job that much easier.
Going the Extra Safety Mile: Integrating AI-Video to Your Safety Scorecards and Program
Safety scorecards are an effective way to get real-time visibility to keep your drivers safe, but you can take it even further with real-time, in-cab coaching and AI Video. Because you’re not in the vehicle with your drivers, risky behaviors such as phone use and driver fatigue are often unnoticed. And it’s easy for anyone of us to mindlessly pick up our phone for a second while driving.
AI Video can detect distracted behaviors and with in-cab, automated alerts, can correct them in real-time to prevent an accident from happening. And the road-facing AI cameras can help detect issues on the road and alert your driver to potential hazards.
Even so, accidents do happen. If your driver gets into an accident, you’ll have instant access to pre– and post-accident footage to understand what happened – and exonerate your drivers, prevent insurance rate hikes and other costs if you are not at fault.
It doesn’t stop with in-cab coaching. This is where it becomes even more of a necessity to have a solution that can connect all of your data. By combining basic scorecard behavior like hard braking and acceleration with scores that track distraction and fatigue, you can remove critical important gaps and get the big picture you need to manage a safe and efficient fleet.
With a holistic safety program in place, you will be able to gain actionable insights to protect your employees, business and brand. There is a variety of factors you have to think about as a manager to make sure all goes according to plan, but it all comes together when you can connect your data, people and processes all in one configurable platform.
