3 Common Reasons Safety Directors Fail

As a motor carrier Safety Director, you have a lot of responsibilities that aren’t directly safety-related. Compliance, anyone? Not to mention human resources, recruiting, insurance, incident management and more. Everything rolls downhill into safety. 

Because this role requires many different skill sets, not everyone is cut out for it. It takes the right type of person with the right type of experience and the right technology to be successful. 

Armed with the proper mindset, tools and knowledge about common pitfalls Safety Directors face, you can set yourself up for success and avoid failure.

Pulled in too many directions

Because you’re the company’s Chief Firefighter, you’re often in reactionary mode. Think about when an incident occurs on the road. You’re going about your day, humming along and then bam! When that call comes in, whatever you were doing is done, and you are now handling the incident. 

Or consider driver coaching. These are not discussions you should table until an end-of-year review. If your in-cab camera system alerts you that someone is repeatedly rolling through stop signs, you have to talk with them ASAP. Sometimes those chats lead to “driver therapy” sessions, where you find out your driver is going through something and needs to bend your ear. 

Those people-related items are the most important part of your job. You need to build in some space to handle those moments and not be bogged down by other distractions, like getting through 5,000 emails a day or processing a pile of documents on your desk. When you’re distracted by administrative tasks, you’re merely treading water. You’re not getting ahead and you’re not using your time to communicate clearly with your team or build an effective safety culture. 

There aren’t enough hours in the day to waste 30 minutes a day on data entry, while at the same time risking important information falling through the cracks. 

What successful Safety Directors do: Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to streamline tasks so they can prioritize people. 

Inadequate systems and resources

You’ve heard it a hundred times: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. There’s a reason we keep score in sports. The competition — and athletes’ motivation — wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t know who was winning and who was losing. 

It’s no different at work. If you don’t have a simple scoreboard that conveys success or failure, you’re flying blind. You must have a solid understanding of your key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Do you know the areas you should be focusing your attention on? Do you know the areas your company has improved or gotten worse over the past 12 months?

As a Safety Director, these metrics should be automated for you, and you should be able to access them instantaneously in a central hub. You don’t want to be logging into multiple systems, digging through spreadsheets or folders — or simply guesstimating. 

On the compliance side, you need to know at a glance which of your drivers are ready to roll and who’s in do-not-dispatch territory. And your DQ files have to be audit-ready at all times.

For recruiting, you have to understand who’s in your pipeline, their stage in the hiring process and your cost per hire. 

And when it comes to training, can you see instantly who’s in progress and who has completed your safety training program?

Finally, your CSA scores, incidents and vehicle maintenance metrics should be easily accessible as well — and more importantly in a format that makes it clear what your action is. 

What successful Safety Directors do: Use a comprehensive recruiting, compliance and training software that offers at-a-glance dashboards for KPIs. 

No standard business operating system 

If you like flying by the seat of your pants, Safety Director is probably not the job for you. There is too much risk and liability to approach your role willy-nilly. 

All three components of the job — recruiting, compliance and training — are vitally important to keeping your drivers safe, ensuring safe roads for everyone and helping your company be successful. 

Perhaps no one has said it better than legendary business theorist W. Edwards Deming: “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

So you need a proven process and a standardized system for how you operate as a Safety Director. If you’re starting from scratch, we recommend delving into the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), popularized by the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. It’s a ready-made system for a smooth operation, down to how and when to meet, how to structure your day and how to approach KPIs. 

Having standard operating procedures and proven processes also allows you to delegate tasks to new team members and automate things as technology allows, opening up more time for you to focus on higher-value tasks like taking care of your team or staying on top of industry standards and regulations. 

What successful Safety Directors do: They don’t wing it. They have an operating system and proven processes for every aspect of their role: recruiting, compliance and training.

If you’re a Safety Director who needs help setting yourself up for success, Avatar can help.