According to FleetNews, 5,506 severe and fatal crashes involving an at-work driver occurred in Britain in 2018. Many experts agree that ensuring your drivers’ safety on the road is even more important than optimising your company’s fleet to cut down costs. As such, you must seek ways to ensure that your drivers are as protected as can be while driving. Do you want to know more about how to improve driver safety as a fleet manager? Here are some points to consider:
- Provide safety education
Experts mostly agree that safety education is central to keeping your drivers safe on the road. Ensure you provide safety training immediately you hire any drivers, whether experienced or not. Behind-the-wheel driver training and classroom instruction can combine well to orient drivers to traffic’s physical realities as well as a broad range of unfavourable weather and road conditions. Your drivers can learn practical coping strategies for facing these risks to reduce their chances of crashing while driving. Be sure to cover safe driving techniques, first aid, and road rules in extensive detail for the best results. Additionally, you should reinforce your company’s safe driving policy using regular reminders and integrate driver performance metrics as part of your drivers’ performance evaluations to make them take safety seriously.
- Keep your fleet well-maintained
A reported 85% of car defects can be detected during a standard walk-around check. Therefore, regularly checking for defects and maintaining your vehicles is a practical strategy to reduce breakdowns and crashes caused by system malfunctions and ensure driver safety. A defective braking system for example, is a known risk factor for road accidents. Should you detect any problems with your brakes, consider tweaking your braking system with remanufactured airbrake calipers to improve driver safety on the road. Several experts recommend picking safe vehicles for your fleet and maintaining a routine preventive maintenance schedule based on the manufacturer’s specifications. Also, train and instruct your drivers to conduct pre-and post-trip vehicle inspections to detect any faults that are present.
- Provide safety kits
Breakdowns and accidents still happen despite the best of safety training, so you must take further steps to promote driver safety should these mishaps occur. For example, it would be best to ensure that every single fleet vehicle is equipped with a proper emergency kit before journeys. This safety kit must include a well-stocked first-aid kit, some water, jumper cables, non-perishable snacks, emergency escape tools, a flashlight, flares, etc. A proper safety kit comes in handy should breakdowns and accidents occur, as the tools in these kits are practical must-haves that may save lives in such scenarios.
- Use telematics
In this modern age, consider using various technologies to assist you in ensuring driver safety for convenience and efficiency. Telematics is one great way of accomplishing this, allowing you to monitor driver behaviour in real-time. Consequently, it would help to invest in a proper fleet management software that can detect harmful driving behaviour like speeding to improve driver safety. Drivers will undoubtedly drive more carefully, knowing these monitoring systems are in place. Telematics can also help you secure attractive insurance discounts and decrease injury-related costs and downtime, keeping your drivers safe and saving you some cash.
