Risk identification and coaching should be the backbone of any safety program. The safety program should be evaluated in its success in changing truck driver behavior. However, there are times when a truck driver doesn’t respond to coaching, training or other forms of feedback. Despite numerous efforts by management, he or she simply refuses or is unable to change.
This is where a progressive disciplinary strategy may be needed to influence positive change. As a balance to a disciplinary plan, we encourage clients to also have a program in place to recognize and reward drivers excelling in the program.
Today, we are going to look at the several disciplinary strategies for you to consider, along with multiple positive reward/incentive programs that may be of interest to your trucking company or organization. Every organization is different, so treat these examples as a potential framework for you to develop a program that is best for your organization.
Implementation of a comprehensive safety programs can be a significant change for any organization. Consequently, few trucking companies make major changes to existing disciplinary policies during the early stages of implementation. Instead, they often delay, perhaps six months to one year before considering significant adjustments. Advantages to this are:
- It gives your organization and its employees time to acclimate to the program.
- You will have accumulated enough data from the program to make fact-based adjustments to your policies.
It is likely you have accumulated massive amounts of data as you adopt new tools and technologies. How do you use the information you track? And what is the best way to reinforce positive behaviors within your organization?
Focus on Positive Reinforcement
Positive reinforcement of desired behaviors not only encourages employees to repeat those behaviors but also can spur employees to perform beyond the minimum expectations. Positive reinforcement can have a longer lasting impact than behavior change driven by discipline for undesirable behaviors.
Positive reinforcement changes more than just the behavior, it changes the attitude about the behavior. This also applies when addressing safe driving behaviors with your employees. Often, the risky behavior will return unless the attitude about the behavior is changed.
For the above reasons, as well as the opportunity to improve employee perception of the safety program you implement, it is advisable to integrate positive reinforcement into the program. It’s a good idea to install positive reinforcement early in the program implementation. You want to ensure you hae early buy-in.
The following are examples of how you can use positive reinforcement within your safety program. Each organization is different, so these ideas may not be ideal for your circumstances. They are presented to foster further thought on your part as to what is best for your organization.
Recognize Your Truck Drivers
This is a recognition strategy used by some trucking companies when a specific event has been identified as a “Positive Recognition Event” or other instances where a driver exhibits superior safe driving skills or courteousness. These are the actions taken by the trucking company when an event meets the outlined criteria:
- Bring the driver in to thank him or her for the professional driving.
- Ask for permission to use the video showing their good driving skills in a future safety meeting.
- Arrange for someone from the management team to be on hand at the next safety meeting to publicly thank the driver. The more senior the manager is, the more impact the recognition will have. Do not underestimate the power of positive recognition.
- At the safety meeting, play the good driving video and facilitate group feedback. Conclude by explaining what stood out as good driving in this event.
- Have management thank the driver for his or her good driving behavior. If suitable, include a reward such as a gift certificate to a local restaurant, company apparel, points towards a safety incentive program or other items.
Truck drivers love these programs. And they go a long way in fostering relationships between upper management and front-line truck drivers.
Create a Best Event
Another option for larger trucking companies is to have each site in a region select what they believe to be their best good driving event that month. These videos are aggregated and then shared at the next month’s safety meeting.
Those in attendance at the safety meeting vote to determine which event was the best. The winner receives a certificate of thanks as well as a gift card to a local restaurant. Drivers in the videos are asked in advance to for permission share the video with the group.
These videos can also be used to a dual purpose, for promotional and motivational programs. Content like this can be embedded in a trucking company’s website and used to lure new customers.
Use a Wheel
This is a strategy that involves providing recognition for high performing drivers, spurring competitiveness, and energizing safety meetings. Here is how it works: On a monthly basis, each company location runs a report to identify all truck drivers who have not had a coachable event or preventable collision during that period.
At their monthly safety meeting, truck drivers listed on this report get a turn spinning the “Wheel of Fortune”. On the wheel are a variety of prizes such as a $10 Subway gift card, movie tickets, or rights to a prime company parking spot for the month.
There are several advantages with this activity including:
- Provides an opportunity for managers to thank drivers for doing a good job.
- Inspires drivers to get better because they all want to “spin the wheel”.
- Improves driver perception of the program.
- Makes for an engaging safety meeting.
- Very low cost and easy to administer.
Using Recognition for Ongoing Success
Your best truck drivers are those who exhibit safe driving on an on-going basis, not just in a single event. These high performing drivers rarely trigger any events and thus their performance can potentially go unnoticed. It is important that these top-tier truck drivers are identified, recognized, and rewarded for their personal commitment to safe driving.
Some companies create truck drive reports to isolate their high performing drivers. Publish or announce this list of top truck drivers each month and thank them for doing a superior job. Be sure to remove names of drivers who were not active during this period or are no longer with your organization. You may also want to exclude any drivers with other driving related issues during this period such as a preventable collision or safety violations.
Many trucking companies also run this report on a quarterly basis and annual basis to perpetuate their recognition program. As the time period of the report is longer, the list of qualifying drivers will be smaller making the accomplishment greater. Publish or announce these lists. You may also wish to include escalating rewards, as the length of time a driver is on this list increases.
What the Report Looks Like
Consider publishing your truck driver report displaying the top drivers at the end of each month and posting it in the break room. Most truck drivers will stop and look to see if his or her name is on the list. Drivers who are not on the list often get a friendly ribbing by co-workers. This simple posting of the list spurs competition amongst the drivers.
Consider rewards this way:
- Monthly: Recognize at safety meeting.
- Quarterly: Recognize at safety meeting and provide a $50 gift card.
- Six Months: Recognize at safety meeting, provide a $200 gift card and a company hat.
- Annually: Recognized at safety meeting, $500 gift card, and a company jacket.
These are just some ideas. Trucking companies can adapt them to the needs of their organizations.
Coaching for Positive Recognition
Realizing that effective, committed coaches are essential to getting the most from a comprehensive safety program, it might be wise to institute a program to reward and recognize your best program coaches.
Try creating something like a coaching effectiveness metric as the basis of a coach recognition program. Each active coach in the system has a Coaching Effectiveness score. The score should be based on the percentage of behaviors that were coached and not repeated in the following 60 days. A higher score means fewer coached behaviors have been repeated.
On a quarterly basis you can review the metric for each of their active coaches. A 70% coaching score could be the minimum expectation for each coach. Coaches with a 90% or greater score receive special recognition as well as a gift certificate to a local restaurant. You can also exclude coaches with limited activity (in their case less than 10 coaching events during the quarter), as well as any coaches with 10% or more of their events overdue for coaching.