How to Share Fleet Safety Tips Through Newsletters

If you want meaningful and permanent reductions to your accident numbers, it isn’t enough to just train your new hires. You need to consistently educate your non-CDL drivers on essential safety and defensive driving techniques. One way to do so is to send fleet safety tips to your drivers via a newsletter.

An Outline For a World-Class Safety Training Program

When we discuss the importance of frequent safety training, we’re really discussing how to create an effective safety training program.

Remember, safety training is not an event. If you’re serious about reducing accidents and injuries at your company, your employees need continuous safety training.

An effective safety training program uses multiple strategies to ensure the best outcomes. To achieve world-class safety results, you need to:

1. Assign new hires online safety training
2. Conduct in-person safety training at the start of employment
3. Host monthly safety meetings focused on a loss-leading indicator
4. Host several larger safety events throughout the year
5. Frequently send safety tips to your drivers

We’ve written blogs on the first four steps before. In this blog, we’ll focus on how sending safety tips via a newsletter will reduce your accidents.

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Safety Tips Newsletter = Increased Safety Mindshare

The goal of ongoing safety training or safety messaging is to create more safety mindshare.

Mindshare is a marketing term used to describe how much consumer awareness a product, company, program, or service has. The more mindshare a company has, the more likely people are to choose it over another.

In our case, we’re using the term safety mindshare to describe how much employees think about safety compared to the other demands they face at work. Your employees are probably concerned about various demands such as quality control, completing work on time, meeting goals, and potentially delivering excellent customer service.

Those are all worthy ventures, but if you want to have low accident numbers, safety has to have a greater mindshare among your employees than any other on-job demand.

An easy way to achieve increased safety mindshare is with a safety tips newsletter. You need to send these safety tips directly to your employees, ensure they read it, and ensure they put the tips to use.

How to Effectively Implement a Safety Tips Newsletter

Creating a safety tips newsletter for your employees is actually quite simple.

There are countless free newsletter templates available. To get started, all you need is a list of employee emails, your newsletter software, and your safety content.

However, while it’s simple to create a newsletter, it can be difficult to correctly implement it. How often should you send it out? What content should your safety tips cover? How can you make sure your employees actually read it?

Let’s tackle all of these pressing questions.

How Often Should You Send Out Your Safety Tips Newsletter?

The whole purpose of your safety tips newsletter is to have a way to frequently engage your employees with safety tips. That said, you don’t want to send out the newsletter too frequently.

You need to ensure your safety tips newsletter will have a positive return on investment. In other words, you need to make sure the amount of time and effort put into the newsletter is worth it.

If you send out the newsletter every day, you’re bound to have a diminishing return on investment. The outcomes in accident reduction won’t be worth the amount of effort you’re putting in.

If you send out the newsletter monthly, you won’t be as burdened to create it frequently, but you won’t be seeing the results in accident reduction you’re looking for.

We recommend sending out a safety tips newsletter on a weekly basis. The one or two hours of work you’ll have to put in per week will be well worth the results the newsletter will have on your accident numbers.

What Content Should The Safety Tips Cover?

An effective safety tips newsletter serves as a detailed reminder of safety information your drivers have learned in previous safety training.

Let’s take a second to talk about our outline for a world-class safety training program from above.

In your new-hire training, you should be teaching your employees everything they need to know to prevent accidents at your company. However, they’re unlikely to remember this information for very long.

That’s why it’s important to host monthly safety meetings focused on a loss-leading indicator. These monthly meetings should cover, in detail, a focused safety topic that will prevent your most common and costly accidents.

Now, you can take this one step further with your safety tips newsletter.

Each weekly newsletter should be focused on one topic related to what you’re teaching in your monthly safety meeting.

For example, let’s say your monthly safety meeting is on intersection safety. The newsletters that month should each focus on a specific aspect of intersection safety. For example, your weekly newsletters that month could cover:

• How to safely approach and navigate intersections
• Performing safe right turns
• Performing safe left turns
• Pedestrians and cyclists at intersections

When you align every part of your safety training in this way, you will see exceptional results.

How Can You Make Sure Your Employees Actually Read it?

Of course, everything we discussed in this blog is worthless if your employees don’t read the newsletters.

You need your employees to read the newsletters, take the tips to heart, and put them to use in order to prevent accidents.

Some newsletter software programs will allow you to see which employees have opened the email you sent. This is important to track, but it still won’t guarantee employee engagement.

You need to take several steps to ensure employees are accountable for reading your safety tips newsletters:

• Send out the newsletter on the same day every week. When you follow a schedule, your employees will know when to expect the newsletter and more of them will read it.

• Make it all about them. You need to focus on how your newsletter will help your employees. When you roll out this initiative, explain to your employees that reading the newsletter will make their jobs easier and help keep them safe.

• Get your managers/supervisors involved. Ask your managers to read the newsletter and engage employees on the tips being covered in each newsletter. It’s a best practice to have a 5-minute meeting each morning that the newsletter comes out and discuss the safety tips with your employees.

For some companies, having a consistent meeting might not be possible. The next best thing is to engage your employees individually to make sure they are reading the safety tips.

Put The Finishing Touches on Your Safety Training Program

If you’re already training new employees and hosting monthly safety meetings, you’re likely getting great safety results. A weekly safety tips newsletter could be the cherry on top of your sundae.

For just a couple of hours of work per week, you can dramatically reduce accidents and improve your safety culture. You’ll reap the rewards of a lower cost of loss while barely breaking a sweat.