Have you ever asked yourself why some trucking companies do better than others? Perhaps you have asked yourself why a certain fleet won a trucking industry award. What are they doing differently from you? Furthermore, what would your fleet need to do to get the same kind of recognition, whether financially or in the marketplace?
There are many similar themes and best practices shared amongst the best-performing fleets. Success does not happen in a vacuum. Successful fleets focus their efforts on the same areas as those among the ranks of the best fleets in the industry. Don’t you want to ensure your fleet is one of the safest and most sought-after on the road? Of course, you do! But how do you go about doing that?
Start with Your Safety Culture
The fact is this: Your safety culture starts at the top. Ensure everyone understands your culture and how it impacts their job—from your highest-ranking executives to drivers on the road, including office personnel, warehouse workers and vendors.
Your safety culture is not thought of as a one-off or something you can just cobble together at the last minute when the auditors are knocking. Rather, safety culture should be incorporated into everything your organization does and continually reinforced. Encourage employees to understand how your safety culture impacts their individual job while also impacting the overall company.
Consider things like investment in video, which has helped many fleets significantly reduce risk and strengthen their culture of safety. We live un an era where truck drivers understand how important safety culture is. It should not be difficult to get buy-in from across your organization. This should be your number one consideration as you build a trucking company to be envied. Still, it should not be your only consideration.
All too often companies of all types and sizes fail because they had trouble sticking to a careful safety strategy they spent a long time devising. Whether it’s a risk management strategy or a safety strategy, it’s important to set your strategy, determine your criteria and stick to it. Even the smallest deviation from the plan can be catastrophic.
For instance, when it comes to risk management, you want to ensure your hiring criteria is solid and consistent. You also want to make sure you are providing quality on-boarding and on-the-job training (coupled with extensive/ methodical online training). Don’t forget about sustained coaching with progressive discipline and professional development training of non-driving staff.
For your safety strategy, engage associates at all levels with frequent and comprehensive training, communications, and opportunities for continuous improvement. Not only will your truck drivers thank you, but so will your CSA scores and your overall bottom line.
Keep Truck Drivers Front of Mind
Guess what? Your number one customers are not the suppliers or brokers or other vendors you deal with on a regular basis. No, they are actually your truck drivers. The fact is your truck drivers should be your number one customer.
There are very specific ways that you can ensure you are protecting your truck drivers. Make sure you proactively prevent risk, protect them when an incident occurs, take an out-of-the-box approach to improve their health and wellness, recognize, incentivize and reward them, and provide them with opportunities to grow.
From your first interaction in the hiring process to daily interactions when they’re on the road or in your facility, your truck drivers need to be the people you think about every day. How can you encourage, reward and protect them while also protecting your company?
And consider this, truck driver engagement matters because you benefit from:
- Higher Productivity
- Higher job satisfaction
- Lower intention to quit
- Lower absenteeism
- Reduced turnover
- Increased organizational citizenship behavior
- Increased organization commitment
- Fewer safety incidents
- Increased vigilance & attentiveness
- Stronger connection between individual work and the company’s success
The Importance of Professional Growth
Coaching is integral to your fleet’s safety. Ensure clear, concise, consistent communications. For truck drivers on the road, a driver app will allow them to see the impact of their habits. When coaching, follow the three Steps to Coaching Success:
- Prepare by identifying skills to review
- Coach using videos
- Summarize your session with notes and next steps
Last, but not least, focus on coaching effectiveness to ensure you’re maximizing your coaching efforts and include progressive discipline as part of your coaching process. Remember, the goal is improvement, so make sure you’re measuring performance over time.
When recruiting, be realistic and don’t overpromise when it comes to earnings and home time. Consider an aggressive new hire orientation on in-truck driving, e-logs, securement, etc. But, don’t stop there; continue regular, on-going training throughout your drivers’ careers. Develop a mentorship program; mentors encourage communications and help new drivers feel part of the family. Develop a career path and encourage drivers to participate. Remember, truck drivers have a voice. Listen and learn through continual communications, such as daily and weekly calls.
Professional growth is important from a goals standpoint. Set goals and work backwards to establish a program that will be successful by creating a program that’s measurable and attainable. Keep the program simple. Provide continual communications and allow drivers to measure their own progress through a mobile app. Focus on frequent safety bonus payouts (monthly, quarterly) with multiple winners, along with annual goals. Don’t focus solely on monetary rewards; find out what will motivate your drivers. Use videos to regularly recognize good driving habits, while recognizing award-winning drivers throughout your company
Invest in Your Future
Above all, be proactive in the evaluation and adoption of fleet safety technologies; get ahead of the curve—allowing you time to test and ensure you have the right technology for your fleet. Do not wait for deadlines and mandates.
Use technology to create a safer environment for your truck drivers, not only helping reduce the likelihood of accidents and injuries, but also improving driver retention. Don’t focus on cost—the marginal cost of new technologies (such as video) is more than returned in lower turnover, reduced risk and decreased liability claims.
A key component of many new technologies is the ongoing driver safety coaching effort that allows us to coach drivers to be better and safer drivers. You simply have too many options out there to help your truck drivers grow to not invest in at least one.
Share the value of safety and technology with everyone throughout your organization, including maintenance, operations, and the executive team, allowing them to see what your drivers face every day. Empathy creates understanding and urgency.
Use video to not only coach your drivers, but to teach your team. Focus on specific driving habits (speeding, distracted or drowsy driving, etc.) throughout the year—using video to illustrate both the good and bad—so your entire team can see your company’s Safety Score improve. Encourage drivers to self-coach by watching their own video through the mobile app.
Keeping a Handle on Your Data
Use data to help measure your results and continually improve your safety program. What areas do you need to pay attention to or to focus on for improvement? Once isolating those, then you can continually raise the bar. In addition to improving safety, data can help you improve efficiency and reduce costs by monitoring fuel habits, CSA scores, incident rates, late loads, productivity, maintenance, driver home time and more. Data is also an integral part of your driver incentive program.
And with so many technologies and systems out there to help companies keep track of organize and act on data, there really is no reason not to invest in one of these systems. Far too often fleets have too much data. Technology can fix that.
If you don’t change, how will you improve? Create a vision for change. Change is not comfortable, but the results are usually worth it. Identify the problems you’re trying to solve. Solve them one at a time with a plan that’s embraced from the top down. Identify the right stakeholders and bring in outside help if needed. Be aware that if the pace of external change exceeds the pace of internal change, you’re in trouble. Communication and transparency make change easier.
Everyone should strive to be an award-winning fleet. Not for the award, but rather, for the improvements and developments you achieved in the process. Create big, bold, brave goals. But, work through them with small steps. We tend to forget that small wins will move you forward and can take you a long way over time. Not only will you better protect your truck drivers and make your fleet safer, but you’ll also become a more effective and efficient company.