Driver analysis shows the need for benchmarking

Many organisations are not doing the basics right when it comes to improving safety. David Williams reports on behalf of Roadsafe, a Driving for Better Business partner.

 

Drivers can do the silliest things – especially when under pressure. Sadly, their managers aren’t exempt from serious lapses of judgment either, as new analysis has revealed.

A senior fleet safety specialist – who is helping to launch a fleet benchmarking tool – recalls with a shudder a time when, not so long ago, road safety was still viewed by many firms and drivers as a luxury they could ill afford.

There was the time a candidate for a sales role in the chemicals industry arrived for a meeting, but only just in time. He explained there were hold-ups on the motorway – so he bypassed them by speeding along the coned-off section.

“He thought he was showing initiative. We took a different view and terminated the interview there and then,” recalls Fleet Safety Management founder Andy Price. Then there was the occasion Price was involved with eyesight screening tests for professional drivers during a safety campaign.

“One (driver) arrived in his car and was going to drive his truck, but admitted he’d forgotten his driving spectacles. The company, quite rightly, stopped him driving”

Fleet Safety Management founder Andy Price 

Today, road safety has risen sharply up the agenda for drivers and managers, encouraged by the Department for Transport (DfT), which is on record as saying: “Employers have a major potential role to play in improving safety on the roads through ensuring that their staff are properly prepared and motivated to drive and ride safely, and that they are using safe vehicles.”

Not everyone has fallen into line, as fresh analysis of Driving for Better Business’s Online Gap Analysis tool shows.

The tool, consulted by more than 900 organisations, comprises more than 60 detailed questions probing road safety management procedures, organisational leadership and culture, journey and mobility management, vehicles, distance travelled, collisions, driver recruitment and other key metrics. On completion, users receive feedback. It will soon be a key stepping stone leading to the new benchmarking tool funded by the DfT under the wing of RoadSafe in partnership with Fleet News, in support of DfBB.

Detailed analysis of the responses shows even the most basic requirements are sometimes being overlooked by managers and the effects, inevitably, affect organisations at driver level too.

Of 166 organisations asked if they formally evaluated driver competency and attitude to road risk – or evaluated training requirements before allowing them to drive on business – a shocking 50% admitted they did not. Of 165 organisations questioned, nearly half – 47% – said they did not check that drivers met Highway Code eyesight requirements, either.

“These shouldn’t be difficult ones to get right,” says Price. “An organisation should get some insight into a person’s attitude to safe driving right at the recruitment phase. There should then be an induction process for new drivers and if you haven’t done a risk assessment, you shouldn’t hand them the keys. It is a basic requirement that you ensure there are no red flags before allowing someone to make a work-related journey, or use one of the organisation’s assets. It shouldn’t be a case of discovering – months down the line – that you have a problem.”

Price says that eyesight screenings, during Road Safety Week, revealed that frequently, 3% of the workforce had defective vision and up to 10% had to be referred for further eyesight tests.

“Good eyesight is a basic, essential requirement,” says Price. 

Other findings are equally disappointing. More than 37% of organisations questioned in the Online Gap Analysis tool had not directly communicated or explained their safe driving policy to relevant employees. Meanwhile, 30% admitted that negative trends or incidents were not acted on. This was compounded by nearly 36% of organisations, which stated that they did not undertake post-incident interviews or share lessons learned.

“As a basic minimum, safe driving policies should cover all the legal minimums that must be met, and should certainly include the four main reasons for serious collisions: inappropriate speed, distracted driving, fatigue and impaired driving. If these are not being communicated, how are employees expected to comply?” asks Price, who formerly headed up Zurich Insurance Group’s European fleet safety practice.

Communication alone isn’t the answer, however. “Outcomes also depend on the organisation’s attitude to what their risk ‘appetite’ is; whether they’re taking it seriously or just box-ticking,” says Price. “If the best sales guy is still having lots of crashes and nobody does anything about it, it’s meaningless.”

Unfortunately, it seems, many drivers cannot rely on their bosses to set a good example. Nearly 30% of organisations that answered said there was no clear demonstration of ‘top level commitment to the management of work-related road risk’, underlining Price’s belief that, if management isn’t taking risk seriously, ‘it’s not going to work”.

But does the blame always lie with senior management? The analysis shows that more than half of the time, data from the road safety programme is not reported to the board regularly.

This might explain why – the analysis shows – nearly 44% of directors and managers do not understand the true costs to business from poor management of drivers. It could also explain why 36.5% of organisations admitted there was no process to address poor driving, even if it was identified.

So, are some organisations disinterested in safety, are they too busy, or is it a fatal oversight? Price believes it’s all of the above. “If they haven’t bought into the idea that actually this is a business imperative, some might say ‘why would they be interested?’. But companies with one or more people at senior level taking it seriously are the ones where you do get traction.

“Unfortunately, for those firms that have negative trends, but don’t do anything about it, it shows they are probably engaged in a box-ticking exercise – or doing nothing”

Fleet Safety Management founder Andy Price

Price believes that, unless organisations’ operational needs are made to dovetail with safety requirements, the safety element “may never work”.

By way of example, the analysis reveals that 62.5% of organisations questioned do not insist on using only five-star EuroNCAP vehicles with the latest safety features. Additionally, more than 71% said they do not insist that vans and light commercials are fitted with autonomous emergency braking (AEB).

“And yet we know that the higher the NCAP rating, the more survivability there is in a collision. We have seen evidence of reductions in collisions with five-star vehicles,” says Price. “Surely that’s good for business?”

Organisations that take safety seriously make it their business to assess common journey routes for high-risk locations such as schools or incident blackspots. And yet, the research shows, of 155 organisations questioned, more than 67% admitted not performing this function.

The pressing case for benchmarking – believes the panel of expert practitioners who are establishing it – is that organisations need to understand the underlying cause of why things go wrong when, inevitably, they do.

“They should ask themselves: ‘What have we done that might have contributed to that person having the crash? Was that person tired because of their work schedule? Were they on the phone to the office? Were they under speed to meet a business objective?’,” says Price.

“Until you know the answers – as revealed by DfBB’s Online Gap Analysis – you aren’t confronting the big question: What have we done as an organisation that may have contributed to this collision occurring?”.

Until more organisations engage with this process, it seems, and with the new benchmarking project to assess their performance against their peers – while gaining invaluable ammunition with which to approach management – little can improve.

“This new analysis emphasises the overwhelming need for benchmarking. If these figures could appear on a balance sheet, organisations would take them much more seriously, but they don’t and are never likely to. With benchmarking, however, these statistics gain a loud new voice.”

Adrian Walsh, executive director of RoadSafe