Fleets face multiple challenges in ensuring an effective corporate road safety culture - Fleet200 roundtable discussion

Fleet200 members are facing a range of road risk management challenges from getting driver, management and union buy-in to ensuring that sub-contractors adopt the same road safety standards.

Participants in the roundtable discussion at the November 2017 Fleet200 Executive Club meeting discussed their company’s road safety challenges and the ways they might tackle them.

Summary of discussion points:

• One business requires its supply chain to adopt the same road safety standards it has in place but the fleet manager is concerned that sub-contractors may not be following these. “My biggest fear that something will happen while somebody is driving on behalf of us and we don’t even know they are driving on behalf of us,” she said.
• Working with other fleet operators in the same industry to share best practice can help raise standards.
• One tactic to get union and driver buy-in for the installation of telematics or in-vehicle cameras is to demonstrate the policy is there to protect the driver. “If you show the safety benefits to a union rep it is difficult to argue against,” a fleet operator said.
• Getting managers to look at telematics data can be a challenge. One fleet operator found that simply changing the terminology from ‘telematics reports’ to ‘fleet management information’ had helped to get managers to use the report.
• Employees can feel pressurised to attend face-to-face meetings and companies need to look at alternative such as video and conference calls. One fleet operator had found conference calls worked for internal meetings.
• Light vans are becoming a bigger risk as the number on UK roads increases.