5 Ways to Improve Fleet Safety For Non-CDL Drivers

Your fleet safety training program should actually be saving you time and money. It doesn’t need to be a burden on your company.

You need a guaranteed return on investment for your fleet safety training program. It’s frustrating to think the effort that goes into your training doesn’t make you and your drivers better off.

Want to ensure your non-CDL defensive driving program is the best it can be? Implement these 5 strategies below to see an immediate reduction in accidents and cost-of-loss.

1. Safety Audits

Before you can improve your safety training program, you need to know where you stand today.

Evaluate all of the time, money, and resources that are currently put into your safety training. Make a cost list of:

• People’s time and related expenses
• Training services purchased
• Safety equipment and programs you invested in

Then, evaluate your accident severity, accident frequency, and cost of loss. This includes things such as:

• Damage to vehicles
• Lost time due to accidents
• People’s time in dealing with accidents
• Worker’s Compensation from injuries
• Court fees

If you’re putting a lot of resources into safety training AND your cost of loss is high, something needs to change. You shouldn’t stop your safety training, but there is likely a better solution.

2. Accident Risk Assessment

Preventing accidents starts with figuring out what your most common and costly accidents are.

You need a top-ten list of your company’s accidents. The list should include accidents that are both frequent and severe in nature. For example, your drivers may frequently cause fixed-object collisions. These are not very costly or severe accidents, but they add up over time and result in a high cost of loss collectively. On the other hand, pedestrian and cyclist collisions are likely rare for your drivers, but when they do happen they are devastating. This would be an extremely costly and severe accident. Even one has a large price to pay.

Go through your last year’s worth of accident reports and tally up what is causing your most common accidents. You shouldn’t stop there, though. You need to determine what is causing your most common accidents. These are called loss-leading indicators.

Determine the loss-leading indicators that are causing the majority of your most common and costly accidents. For example, if you suffer from a high number of rear-end collisions, one of your loss-leading indicators is failure to maintain a safe following distance.

The easiest way to determine your loss-leading indicators is with a driver monitoring system. Alternatively, you can do some deep dives into accident reports. Either way, you need to figure out the 5 to 10 unsafe behaviors that are causing the majority of your accidents.

Book a Free Fleet Safety Strategy Meeting with a Safety Expert

3. Train to Your Loss-Leading Indicators

Once you’ve determined your loss-leading indicators, train to them. You need to focus your time and attention on what is causing most of your cost of loss.

For example, your drivers are likely guilty of the following unsafe behaviors that are causing your most common collisions:

• Failure to Look Around before entering an intersection
• Backing without Getting Out and Looking first
• Changing lanes without Looking Around and checking their mirrors
• Failure to Look Ahead and Look Around for pedestrians and cyclists
• Failure to rock and roll in their seat before turning

If that’s the case, your defensive driving should heavily focus on the safe behaviors necessary to prevent these accidents (i.e., maintaining a safe following distance, Looking Ahead and Looking Around for pedestrians and cyclists, etc.).

This is a guaranteed way to reduce your cost of loss while making the most of your training time.

4. Take Your Fleet Safety Training Online

One of the easiest ways to make your fleet safety training more efficient is to move it online with a learning management system (LMS for short).

When you utilize an LMS, you will:

• Give your employees access to safety training from any location with any smart device
• Easily track employee usage and completion of training
• Communicate with everyone on the system in just a few clicks
• Create, host, and organize all of your training content in one place
• Reduce your cost of loss while spending less time on training

A learning management system is truly the backbone of any effective fleet safety training program.

5. Utilize Effective Training Cycles

Driver’s ed and a clean driving record aren’t enough. When you hire a driver, you’re putting your company in their hands. You need to make sure they are safe, defensive drivers. That’s why you should include defensive driving in your employee onboarding training.

Assign defensive driving training modules through your learning management system directly after hire. Have employees complete them on their own before ever getting behind the wheel of one of your vehicles. A program like The Fleet Safety Course makes this extremely easy.

Of course, onboarding training isn’t enough. Just like you don’t remember much from freshman year math class, your drivers won’t remember everything you taught them in onboarding training after a few months on the job. You need to do monthly safety training as well.

Assign lessons via your learning management system each month to your drivers. Have these lessons focus on your most common and costly unsafe behaviors, like we discussed above.

Alternatively, you could conduct monthly safety meetings focused on one of your biggest loss leaders. Our program The Monthly Safety Initiative makes it easy to implement this process.

Monthly safety meetings allow you to:

• Reduce your most common and costly accidents
• Spend a small amount of time on training for a big return on investment
• Remind your drivers of essential safety practices on a consistent basis

Improve Your Safety Results Today

You don’t need to accept high accident and injury rates anymore. You can do something about it. 

When you implement the strategies shared in this article, you can protect your employees and make your company safer. Not only that, but you can actually save your company time and money in the process.

Effective safety training can pay for itself twice over. If those aren’t the sort of results you’re getting today, book a meeting with us.