When it comes to lowering risk for any mobile workforce, there’s a lot you can have direct supervision over. For instance, you can create policies around driver safety that help lower accident rates and you can closely oversee fleet vehicles to maintain their condition and ensure uptime. But workers who use their own vehicles for work — also known as a ‘grey fleet’ — are also a crucial responsibility for any fleet manager.

Thorough supervision of grey fleets is necessary in order to ensure your company’s legal good standing, protect the financial bottom line, and lower overall risk. In this blog, we will discuss the importance of strong grey fleet management, and how to go about it.

Why is managing a grey fleet important?

Grey fleets come with a unique set of challenges. Keeping a close eye on employees’ handling of their own vehicles can be difficult at first. But for an active grey fleet, the oversight is just as critical as when the company’s privately own vehicles are in use.

First, managing grey fleets well can prevent costly accidents and injuries. When employees drive their own vehicles with extra care, and when they recognise their responsibilities to the law and company policy, the chances of costly accidents and injuries are greatly lowered.

Second, managing grey fleets is crucial to ensuring more vehicle uptime. Employees will have their own habits when it comes to vehicle upkeep, but those practices may not be ideal when it comes to protecting long-term vehicle performance. Serious costs can fall on your company if staff use their vehicles for work, yet fail to keep their vehicles in proper shape.

Finally, managing grey fleets is part of legal compliance. Your business must adhere to Health and Safety Work Act (HSWA) regulations, which grey fleets as mobile ‘workplaces’ are subject to. Making sure employees handle their vehicles safely is a big step towards meeting your company’s H&S obligations.

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The process of managing your grey fleet 

It’s helpful to think of successful grey fleet management as a series of logical steps. By following them, you’ll help see to it that the fleet is a source of healthy company profits — not costs, legal problems, and administrative hassles. Here’s a simple list of recommendations:

1. Assess your current level of risk.
You’ll need to know exact areas where your grey fleet is liable to increase overall risk. To do this, identify key performance indicators, such as vehicle types, required journeys, travel times, and each employee’s licensing and driving records. Then monitor those indicators on a regular basis for major changes or red flags (lengthy trips, for example, could perhaps be rerouted or broken up to avoid driver fatigue).

2. Audit existing vehicles in the grey fleet.
Get all the insight you can into each vehicle’s condition in order to prevent costly breakdowns and downtime. Pay attention to whether vehicles:

• Are roadworthy, with an up-to-date warrant of fitness (WoF)          
  
• Are properly insured for road use
  
• Is never loaded beyond the weight it can bear
  
• Are promptly taken for repairs and scheduled maintenance 
  
  

Even when employees are trustworthy as regards their own vehicles, it’s essential for you to know and monitor the mechanical condition at all times to limit risk.   

3. Collaborate with Health & Safety to create a grey fleet policy.
Meeting with staff responsible for H&A is an important step, as they typically are the ones to keep up with evolving laws and to help shape company culture around them. As a fleet manager, you should work with H&A to develop a policy that specifically addresses grey fleets — a policy which you and other executive leaders in the company can then effectively enforce.

4. Implement a driver training programme to increase employee road skills.
Firstly, driver training programmes are required by the HSWA. And practically, training is an essential way to keep employees up-to-date on best practices from defensive driving to ergonomic comfort behind the wheel, thus lowering overall risk. Having all grey fleet staff take the training, even the long-time, confident drivers, will help you them accountable and can greatly reduce chances of accident costs and liabilities.

Managing grey fleets is part of successfully managing the entire fleet.

By making strong, sensible grey fleet management a priority, you’ll lower risks, keep more vehicles on the road, keep your drivers safe…and help shore up your company's continued growth. 

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