What Does It Mean to Be 'Fleet Safety Certified'?

Most light-duty fleets are not regulated by the Department of Transportation. Thus, there is no specific “fleet safety certification” or demarcation for being “fleet safety certified.” 

Even so, you shouldn’t wash your hands of fleet safety training altogether. You stand to gain so much by implementing effective fleet training for your drivers. You stand to lose so much if you ignore pressing safety training issues.

Why Does Safety Training Matter to Your Fleet?

Truck drivers, bus operators, and other CDL drivers are all mandated to receive special training to drive for a living. Your vocational drivers are not mandated to receive any training beyond their basic driver’s license, but they face the exact same risk.

Whether your drivers are spraying for pests, fixing downed wires, or dealing with city water conditions, the most dangerous thing they do is drive. They face the most risk for accidents, injuries, and even death when they get behind the wheel.

You don’t need to accept this as a cost of doing business. You can prevent accidents, injuries, cost of loss, and protect your drivers. It all comes down to risk management. 

The Three Major Benefits of Effective Fleet Safety Training

As we’ve established, your drivers face risk. They face the risk of others out on the road and their own unsafe behaviors. Without proper training and safety education, they could cost you money and suffer or cause serious injuries.

However, if you implement effective fleet safety training, you can reduce or eliminate that risk.

More specifically, you will benefit from:

• Reduced cost of loss: effective fleet safety safety programs and courses will save you more money on cost of loss than you spend on the program. If you want to learn more about the costs of an accident, we suggest you read this article.
  • As you’ll learn in that article, the average minor accident costs $16,000. An accident involving any sort of minor injury will cost you $70,000 or more. Fleet safety training that prevents even one serious accident is well worth the money and effort.
• Save yourself time: when you prevent accidents, you’re saving yourself time. Accidents and injuries take up a lot of your time and energy. They take up company resources as well. By putting forth efforts to reduce accidents, your job becomes easier, your schedule is predictable, and you spend less time dealing with emergencies.
  • Moreover, if you outsource your safety training program, you stand to save even more time. It takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make a safety training program. It stings even more when you get mediocre results. You can outsource safety training, save yourself the trouble, and have the guarantee of reduced accidents and injuries.
• Protect your employees: you care about your employees. You want everyone to go home happy, safe, and healthy at the end of each shift. The problem is, many people in your shoes don’t recognize that driving is dangerous. They believe their employees are safe and accidents won’t happen. This is a false sense of security.
  • Without safety training, your drivers have unsafe behaviors. That’s a guarantee. If they have unsafe behaviors, it’s also a guarantee that they will eventually cause an accident. If you don’t do something to protect your employees, eventually one of them will be hurt.

Download eBook: How to Choose a Defensive Driver Safety Program

What is Involved With Fleet Safety Training?

When you invest in fleet safety training, you save money, save time, and protect your people. But where do you begin?

There are three components that every effective fleet safety training program has:

• New-hire online training
• Behind-the-wheel driver training
• On-going safety training

New-Hire Online Training

When you hire a new driver, you likely run their MVR, check that they have a license, and give them the keys. That’s not enough to reduce their risk. If their job requires them to drive, they are a professional driver. As such, they need a leg-up on all the amateurs out there putting them at risk.

You should assign online safety training to every new hire. Ask that they complete it before they even come in for their first shift. Of course, you will need to pay them for their time, but that is much cheaper than paying for the rear-end collision they’re likely to cause.

Implementing online training is easy. Programs like The Fleet Safety Course allow you to:

• Give your employees world-class safety training accessed by any smart device
• Assign safety training to your whole company with just a few clicks of a button
• Track employee usage
• Run reports to confirm employees have completed their training

If you invest in a program like The Fleet Safety Course, you’ll enjoy a positive return on investment in a matter of months.

Behind-the-Wheel Driver Training

Online driver training will teach your drivers essential knowledge about defensive driving. However, defensive driving takes more than knowledge. It takes skill.

If you want your drivers to know how to be defensive drivers, they need practice. That’s why we recommend you implement a behind-the-wheel driver training program for new hires.

An effective BTW program will:

• Teach drivers how to use essential defensive driving principles
• Confirm their use of safe driving practices
• Allow drivers to develop safe driving habits

Of course, developing your own behind-the-wheel training program can be a challenge. We’ve created a defensive driving certification process called LLLC Defensive Driving Certification. LLLC stands for Look Ahead, Look Around, Leave Room, and Communicate.

Our process certifies your instructors and allows them to certify your drivers. It’s a cost-effective and highly-effective process that millions of drivers have gone through. The result is always fewer accidents for your company. 

Ongoing Safety Training

Do you remember how to solve a quadratic equation? Do you remember all of the events leading up to WWI? Or, how about any of the major themes from The Great Gatsby?

Of course you don’t.

Just like you don’t remember everything from freshman year of high school, your drivers won’t remember everything from their new-hire training. That’s why you need a way to offer your drivers continuous driver safety training.

We recommend you host monthly safety meetings to cover a loss-leading indicator in detail. You could focus on maintaining a safe following distance, performing safe turns, how to navigate intersections, etc.

Our studies show that when a company focuses on a loss-leading indicator each month, that accident type goes down by 20% or more for that month.

You can create your own materials or invest in an off-the-shelf safety meeting program like our Monthly Safety Initiative.

Regardless of your preferred approach, ongoing training is key to overall fleet safety.

Are You 'Fleet Safety Certified'? 

Any company with drivers faces tremendous risk of loss and accidents. To avoid that risk, these companies must implement:

• New-hire online safety training
• Behind-The-Wheel driver training
• Ongoing safety training

With these three strategies, you’ll be “Fleet Safety Certified” as far as we’re concerned. That means you’ll have fewer accidents, save money from reduced cost of loss, save yourself time dealing with emergencies, and protect your employees.

Accidents aren’t just “the cost of doing business.” You can prevent them and become a world-class safety organization.