We often reiterate throughout our blogs how important it is not only to maintain a profitable business but to keep everyone safe, ensure operations run efficiently, have all departments collaborating together and secure the staff´s buy-in.
The points regarding drivers are obviously key for businesses that revolve around driving operations—they need the drivers to physically complete jobs— it would be impossible to complete them without drivers. In order to maintain efficiency in the driving operations, you need to maintain the highest safety standards within an organisation as well as making drivers’ lives easier.
Driver training should be an important part of this process and ongoing education and assessment is a direct consequence of driver monitoring: this is an aid to developing risk assessment strategies, cutting fuel costs, increasing driver retention and eventually generating more profitable activity.
According to a survey performed by Brake, the road safety charity, on the topic of driver training about speed published in the second part of its Fleet safety survey report 2015, 17% of the fleets interviewed “do not train, assess or educate drivers on speed”. One in five organisations do not do any training or educate drivers at all with regards to speed.
This seems quite a worrying statistic, since it indicates there is still an awful lot to do in relation to safety and efficiency. We all know some safety regulations could be just seen as “common sense”, but sometimes rules are never repeated enough and there are still a high number of violations. If we think about driver distraction, for example, we all know it makes perfect sense not to use our mobile phone behind the wheel, yet how many people flout this law on a daily basis?
In the research done by Brake, the charity shares other methods that may be used to train drivers which could also be used for other aspects of driving. We share them in this blog post, hoping they might help you in creating an effective driver training strategy:
• internal communications and briefings: potentially on any type of topic, useful if done regularly;
• induction awareness training: useful for having drivers know how much their style impacts on safety and consumption;
• interview questions during recruitment: has to be mandatory and helps as starting point for training new hires;
• remedial training: should necessarily follow after a violation or any other event requiring it;
• refresher awareness;
• online driver risk assessment;
• psychometric tests.
Do you actively use any of these methods for driver training, and which do you find to be the most successful? And what do you use to monitor drivers and evaluate where they may be in need of further training; does this happen only in the event of a fine?
