Safety is key to this company’s culture and has been continually championed by senior management. CGGVeritas introduced a 'gold standard' for their work-related road-safety policies and procedures, lead by its Board’s desire to meet all its health and safety responsibilities.

Company Name: CGGVeritas (Surrey)
Fleet Size Overall: 75
Company Cars: 35
Private vehicles used for business purposes: 40

Quick Links:
Nature of Operation and Driving Activities
Organisational Structure
Work Related Road Safety Policy and Procedures
Work Related Road Safety Guidance for drivers
Specific examples of procedures
Accident reduction
Financial benefits
Lessons learned
Current and future developments
 

Company Overview 

CGGVeritas is the world’s leading international geophysics company with 15,000 staff worldwide. It is the leading provider of Geophysical Exploration & Processing Services to Oil and Gas Industry. The company operates in all regions of the world. It is also involved in Marine and Land Exploration and runs the largest fleet of seismic vehicles.

Safety is part of the company’s culture and is driven from the top down. Its pioneering stance over at-work driving safety in the UK could become a model for action globally.

Nature of Operation and Driving Activities

CGGVeritas has a very strong health and safety culture working in the oil industry and the business will not deal with contractors unless they also have high quality health and safety systems in place.

Its unique fleet covers just 28,000 business miles a year. For its “User Chooser fleet” a key requirement was safety. All vehicles must have driver and passenger airbags, be equipped with ABS brakes and have a European New Car Assessment Programme crash test rating of four stars or above. In addition, as all company cars are renewed, electronic stability control (ESC) will become a standard feature and grey fleet must also be equipped with ESC by 1st January 2010.

With a total of 164 drivers, including 65 staff eligible for company cars (about half of these opting for cash in lieu of a car) and other staff driving their own vehicles on business or daily rentals, there were complex work related road safety issues to be managed.

Employees felt that the systems were intrusive, as they were required to provide information on their private vehicles and as business mileage was low and infrequent, they could not understand the need for such stringent policies.
CGGVeritas understood that staff attitudes stemmed from a lack of understanding and as a result, brought in a consultant to convince the company's board that they had a legal duty to manage their occupational road risk and to investigate the causes behind road crashes.

Once the legal issues were explained to the Company’s President and Board and the results of the thorough audit of the company’s systems were made clear, CGGVeritas immediately implemented a review of their existing system to ensure that senior management awareness and control of their at-work driving health and safety responsibilities were defined. In addition, all CGGVeritas staff were briefed on their responsibilities.

Organisational Structure

 CGGVeritas Organisational Structure



Work Related Road Safety Policy and Procedures

The prime driver behind CGGVeritas introducing gold standard work related road safety policy and procedures, was its Board’s desire to meet all its health and safety responsibilities. As a result, the Board approved far-reaching and comprehensive measures for the management of occupational road risk. These included:

  • Licence checks on each of the 164 registered drivers employed by the UK operation.
  • Fully documented vehicle safety checks, including annual inspection of each registered vehicle by independent company.
  • Recording crash history, driving convictions and medical conditions.
  • Tracking insurance, vehicle service and MoT details on privately-owned cars.
  • Developing a comprehensive 'live' audit of all drivers and vehicles.
  • Annual online risk assessment and relevant training for each of the 164 registered drivers. 
     

Work Related Road Safety Guidance for drivers

Measures taken by the company include:

  • Re-writing the business driving handbook to include all critical duty of care information and what to do in an emergency 
  • Undertaking a driver, vehicle and journey risk assessment analysis. Online driver risk assessments are provided by Drive & Survive with on-the-road training provided if required. Overseas drivers coming to the UK are given on-road training by RAC, prior to being issued with a company vehicle.
  • All drivers being issued with a document giving them authority to drive on business, which includes crash history, driving convictions, medical information and is signed by the employee as a true record
  • Similar authorisation forms being applied to all company and private vehicles driven on business so the company has an audit that tracks service schedules, insurance, MoT renewals and compulsory safety features
  • Fully documented vehicle safety checks carried out once a month which if not completed within seven days of notification disqualifies the driver from work-related driving. The checks cover tyres, glass, fluid levels, bodywork, windscreen washers and company-provided safety kits.
  • Annual safety inspection of each registered vehicle, by an independent external company.
  • Twice-yearly DVLA driving licence checks, which initially resulted in the company discovering that two employees had been driving illegally for a number of years on United States' licences. That problem was immediately resolved. 
     


Specific examples of procedures

  1. Risk assessment - Partners and spouses of employees complete online risk assessments and other documentation if they want to drive company cars, so the organisation has a complete audit of all vehicles and drivers.
  2. Vehicle Safety Checks - All registered vehicles must have a Vehicle Safety Check carried out at maximum 1 monthly intervals. Each vehicle has a random inspection by an external company once per year and drivers receive maximum 7 days notice of such inspections.
  3. Auditing and review - CGGVeritas review their business driving policies and procedures on an annual basis.
  4. Performance measures - Performance of CGGVeritas Business Driving Procedures is measured through reduction in accident rate and associated costs.
     

Accident reduction

Now, with 'safer drivers and safer vehicles' since the occupational road risk programme was started in 2003, CGGVeritas has seen incident levels - which include broken windscreens - reduce from 15 in April 2002-April 2003 to 4 in the 12 months to April 2008.

Financial and other benefits 

Simultaneously the cost of those incidents has reduced from almost £15,000 to £3,700 per annum.

Lessons learned 

The Management team which introduced CGGVeritas’s work related road safety policies learnt the following:

  • You can do so much as Fleet Manager but to really succeed in changing the Driving Culture you must have the support of the Directors of the Company.
  • Find a good independent industry specialist to support your plan and explain to the Directors, Managers and Staff the implications of non-compliance.
  • Be clear about what you want your system to manage when specifying the software and keep it simple.
  • Design your software programme so that it is very easy for staff to use and it provides useful information to back your staff, eg MOT and Insurance Renewal notifications.
  • Some people will be very angry at the intrusion you are making on their personal lives. Understanding this is crucial to finding a way to deal with it.
  • Once Senior Managers are supportive people will fall into line. 
     

Current and future developments

CGGVeritas plans a review of their Business Driving Handbook and database in 2008, to further improve the systems. They are currently looking at including environmental initiatives into their policies in line with the Company's corporate plan.

See the Driving for Better Business case studies page.
Go to the Driving for Better Business website.