Building a successful fleet safety culture

Historically, a culture of competing interests has often existed between a trucking fleet’s operational side—focused on hauling freight, generating revenue, and satisfying customer demands—and the safety side—focused on initiatives for preventing accidents. However, over time, that has begun to change and, in today’s best trucking fleets, that cultural divide has disappeared—and for good reason.

The operational side is still focused on a host of business challenges, including regulatory compliance, the shortage of qualified drivers and technicians, and ever-increasing operational costs related to fuel, equipment, parts, and technology. Carriers also continue to operate through periods of fierce industry competition and razor thin margins, leading many to reevaluate their operating costs.

The best carriers have found that profitable operations undeniably include safe operations. They understand how costly accidents can be. In addition to direct costs like medical care, legal expenses, property damage, and lost production, there are many indirect costs that can impact a fleet's bottom line, including:

• Equipment downtime, causing a loss of production and customer service
• More frequent equipment replacement
• Higher maintenance costs
• Employee turnover, hiring, and onboarding
• Increased insurance premiums and possible legal costs
• Reduced equipment trade-in value
• Additional work hours/overtime
• Management dealing with accidents rather than focusing on value-added tasks
• Employee absences and low morale

Understanding the impact of these direct and indirect costs and their effect on bottom-line numbers has helped transform the best fleets’ safety efforts, instilling new ways of thinking about the sunk cost of accidents and how to avoid them. This leads to the next step—implementing operational safety controls. Those controls should be outlined in a company safety or accident prevention manual. Operational excellence is directly linked to effective safety management. A successful safety program needs to be written, but it should be seen as a working document that is regularly updated to address the actual exposures faced by drivers and the processes and expectations laid out for them in dealing with those exposures. It should be introduced to drivers during orientation and reinforced through ongoing training and testing. Key areas of safety plans will usually include:

• Management commitment, including the company’s guiding principles
• Employee training
• Rules and work procedures
• Policies
• Safe work practices
• Hazard identification
• Communication
• Emergency response
• Incident reporting and accident analysis

Improving safety reduces inefficiency, unnecessary driver turnover, and avoidable equipment downtime— all of which are hallmarks of the best trucking operations.