Ensuring The Safety of Your Fleet

A safe fleet of vehicles for your business means less money lost to unnecessary repairs, and it also means lower insurance premiums. We are constantly offering our clients advice on how to bring down their insurance costs, and we find that one big way of keeping costs under control is to focus on having a safe and efficient fleet.

Hire Good Drivers

Your company has a comprehensive process for hiring employees who will handle money or be in charge of corporate security, and with good reasons. You should realize that those good reasons also apply to hiring fleet drivers. Always check the past driving record and arrest history of potential drivers to make sure that you are getting the safest possible drivers for your company.

Make Safe Driving Courses Mandatory

Driving is one of those tasks that people tend to take for granted after a few years of experience. Once a year, you should make it mandatory for your fleet drivers to attend a safe driving course and keep their safe driving skills up to date. You can offer incentives such as a small cash bonus for each driver to attend safe driving courses to help improve the chances that your drivers will apply the information they learn to their daily driving habits.

Enforce Routine Maintenance Schedules

All of the safety training in the world is not going to help your fleet drivers if your vehicles experience operational issues that could have been prevented with routine maintenance. Each vehicle should have a routine maintenance schedule that should be followed closely. The maintenance team assigned to doing the routine procedures should be held accountable for making sure that all routine maintenance is done on time.

Keep An Eye On Driver Habits

There are plenty of tools you can use to monitor the driving habits of your fleet team and keep an eye on drivers who use questionable methods. If you have drivers that ignore the posted routes, then that can cost you money on fuel and wear on the tires. You should also keep track of drivers who speed regularly and are reported by the public as driving erratically. Monitoring the habits of your drivers can help improve driver training, and can also let you know which drivers need personal attention from management.

Make Safety An Ongoing Conversation

It is difficult for your drivers to take safety seriously when the company does one training each year and then never mentions safety again until the following year. You need to make safety an ongoing part of the corporate culture through regular trainings, constantly addressing safety concerns, and reminding your fleet drivers and maintenance workers of the importance of safety. You can make the safety conversation even more important by offering quarterly safety incentives to the group for every quarter where there are no negative safety incidents.

Good safety policies for your fleet can result in cost savings, increased employee efficiency, and more money on the company’s bottom line. You should make safety a primary concern throughout your fleet staff, and make sure that everyone understands the importance of following the company fleet safety policies at all times.