How Industry-Leading Fleets Are Driving Safety Training
We’ve all heard of driver and vehicle safety. Driver safety scorecards and reporting are high on the list of what fleet managers look for in third-party and OEM telematics providers, and it’s for a variety of reasons. An accident on the road can do more than just be a cost-sink for an organization. The cost to your reputation as a safe organization, as well as the human cost, from risky driving is what could really be at stake.
By monitoring your vehicles and your drivers’ behavior on the road, you can eliminate most accidents and injuries that could occur. But, knowing that as humans we are prone to error, there are still steps that you can take in order to ensure the safety of your fleet’s drivers as well as the general public. In order to gather more information on what fleets across North America are doing to minimize risky driving behavior and train safer drivers on the road, Utilimarc has partnered with DTE Energy to run a survey to assess what aspects of fleet safety are most important to managers – from policies to equipment, how they’re training drivers or if they are using incentives to achieve their results.
Utilimarc’s 2022 Vehicle Safety Survey Results
The first question we wanted to answer from this survey, is how many participants (and their respective fleets) already had safety policies in place. Unsurprisingly, most participants did – with the majority of respondents listing a 360 walk-around (74.4%) and/or a call/hands-free policy (71.8%) to be most frequently included.
Another important aspect of this question wasn’t simply, do you have the policies in place – but more so, what type of equipment do you have in use to enforce the policies themselves. A majority of respondents cited speeding controls as their main safety technology utilized (54.8%), followed closely by the use of drive cameras monitoring the vehicle itself (51.6%).
Organizations are under pressure from a variety of sources to maintain a fleet that runs and operates safely. 79% of survey respondents indicated that their organizations provided safety training for their drivers, with on-site seminars and driving courses being the main education sources.
Whilst the majority of respondents did not experience difficulties implementing new safety technology (55.9%), roughly 44% of responding fleets did experience unforeseen challenges – from changes in routine and senior management buy-in, to driver disapproval and install issues.
As you might expect, most organizations that responded to our survey indicated that their drivers undergo safety training, or additional safety training, on a annual basis – although some organizations have adopted a more frequent training schedule.
The majority of survey respondents (51%) do not currently provide safety scorecards to their drivers. Roughly 30% do provide scorecards to their drivers, and the final 18% indicated that they either do not but are planning to, or do not utilize a scorecard system. Unsurprisingly, of the fleets that responded that use safety scorecards, the majority indicated that drive time, speeding events, harsh acceleration, harsh breaking, cornering events and seatbelt usage were amongst the most common metrics on their safety reporting.
Most fleets that responded to our survey (roughly 79%) indicated that they do not currently have a driver recognition program in place for good safety scores. Although, for the fleets that do utilize an incentives program – gift cards, year-end spot bonuses or monthly newsletter recognition were included.
The majority of respondents for this survey (59%) indicated that they have union employees, whereas roughly 30% do not.
If you are interested in hearing more about the results of Utilimarc and DTE’s 2022 Vehicle Safety survey, please contact a member of our analytics team for more information.
