Can your fleet continue to serve your business effectively? Only if you take the right steps to protect it.
By proactively protecting your drivers and your fleet operations in general, you’ll reduce accident risk, keep your drivers safe, lower costs, and reduce time-consuming admin work. You’ll also keep more vehicles on the road, ultimately ensuring your company stays profitable.
In this blog, we’ll reveal four ways you can protect your company and drivers as part of good fleet risk management, and how SurePlan can help you minimise fleet downtime and control costs along the way.
Learn more about fleet risk management here.
- Bolster safety through driver training
The competence and safety skills of your fleet drivers are more important than anything else. Your drivers should be continually up-skilled through a systematic driver training programme.
Driver training increases awareness of common road risks, and shows drivers how their behaviour behind the wheel directly influences accident risk. Fleet drivers must know how to be vigilant, conscientious, and safe, whatever the situation.
With driver training programmes, you can keep your drivers accountable and root out unsafe behaviours. You can also substantially lower your company’s liability should an accident occur.
- Prevent distracted or impaired driving
When drivers lack their full faculties behind the wheel, they become a huge risk and create dangerous conditions. Just consider some of these statistics on distracted driving:
- 67% of crashes in New Zealand occurred on open roads, where speed limits exceed 70 km/hr.
- Most accidents occur during the morning and evening commutes.
- In the first 95 days of 2019, there were 110 road deaths, reported by the Ministry of Transport.
- In 2018, there were 382 people killed due to road incidents.
It’s key to warn drivers about distracted or fatigued driving, and to insist that they avoid using mobile phones and other devices while on the road. Drivers impaired by alcohol or other substances should be prohibited from driving. Driver Check is a useful tool to understand your drivers’ personal histories.
Risk management solutions provide clear insight into each driver’s level of risk, revealing which employees need remedial attention and helping you reduce distracted driving overall.
- Keep all staff accountable to the Health and Safety law
New Zealand's Health and Safety At Work Act (HWSA) stipulates that companies do everything they can to ensure the safety of employees. Each fleet vehicle is considered ‘workplace’ — so fleet managers must act accordingly.
Compliance involves identifying hazards, assessing your fleet’s level of risk, and implementing controls to protect employees and reduce the risks. Controls might include using a higher-visibility incident reporting process, regularly holding meetings about safe driving, and strictly adhering to vehicle maintenance schedules.
All staff members must personally understand the importance of H&S compliance, and keep up-to-date on any changes to the law.
- Implement accident management to limit costs and downtime
Accident management is a crucial role in your overall fleet management process.
Outsourcing your accident management can give you a better handle on the most important issues surrounding road incidents. These include arranging roadside assistance, ensuring driver safety after a crash, getting the best rates on HWSA-compliant vehicle repair and replacement, and negotiating insurance claims with third parties.
It’s a priority for fleets to reduce accident costs, downtime, and the possibility of crashes in the first place. Great outsourced accident management accomplishes all three, while giving you peace of mind and visibility into the process. We invite you to review our accident management cheat sheet to ensure you’re never caught out in this area.
Protecting your fleet involves a range of complex risk-lowering strategies. By trying to handle it all in-house, you can easily miss some critical steps. Instead, one of the wisest things to do is outsource your fleet risk management...it’s the surest way to keep your drivers safe, protect your company, and minimise costs over the long haul.
Use our ROI calculator today to crunch the numbers for fleet risk management and learn how much you can save.
Topics: Fleet Risk Management
