Fleet safety depends on your vehicles and your drivers working together. Your vehicles must be kept in top condition with regular checks to make sure everything is in working order.
But good maintenance isn't enough to constantly improve your driver safety as well. How do your drivers know which routes are more dangerous or which turns they're taking too fast?
Telematics, interactive software and routine improvements put the power in your driver's hands to improve their own vehicle and driving safety. What are the tools you can use to empower your drivers to improve fleet safety in the garage and on the road?
For fleet drivers, the city is alive. Some streets are under construction. Some roll far smoother, some have more pedestrian traffic. Some have seasonal traffic, some have an unusually long stoplight with a broken sensor strip. Your drivers know where these little details occur but the recent revolution of GPS routes has actually made it harder to avoid these trouble-spots – unless you make the map more interactive and responsive for your drivers.
Allow your drivers to mark the trouble areas and the ideal routes. Adapt your live routes based on these preferences. Set things like construction zones on a timer to expire while pedestrian areas can even trigger seasonally through the UI and re-route alerts.
The best way to improve your own performance is to see stats on how you're doing. See your running speed to challenge yourself to run faster. Likewise, drivers who see their driving speed, turn velocity, route efficiency, and other telematics will automatically start trying to beat their best. Talk about ideal safety scores and your drivers will aim to hit those ideals.
Share daily or weekly telematics reports that your drivers can understand to start seeing results almost immediately. Everyone wants to be at their best. Seeing it in numbers makes that possible.
Give your drivers the power to check and maintain their own vehicles. Pre-flight checks are a natural part of being a technical operator of any large machinery. Those who take pride in their vehicles and care about safety often do their own check. A fast, easy, yet complete checklist can help your drivers make sure their vehicles are safe and in good repair both before each drive and as each vehicle comes back to the garage.
Providing maintenance equipment that your drivers can access so that quick and last-minute repairs can be done. Keep some oil, wiper fluid, antifreeze, and other useful tools so drivers can quickly top-up, tighten bolts, check a rattle, or make a note for maintenance to take a deeper look.
Want to examine the best way to do a route and unify your driver methods? Try overlaying the telematics on a specific route. Show the speed, velocity, stops, and re-routes taken by different drivers. Talk about how it worked out, what was the fastest, what was the safest, and how to improve each route your drivers share.
If drivers are assigned just one route, overlay different day's telematics to find trends and the safest solutions between your driver choices and styles.
Take suggestions from your drivers. Talk about safety goals and then share ideas about how to improve the routes, the vehicles, and your situational protocols. Who answers the phone when the driver is driving? What devices and mounts do you use for onboard technology in fleet vehicles? How do drivers get weather or construction warnings about their route?
Brainstorm using the expertise of your team with regular safety meetings and then implement the best ideas from each meeting.
How do you empower your drivers to improve safety? Put the fleet management tools of telematics and live GPS mapping into their hands and take the suggestions that arise out of experience and expertise. Contact us to explore the possibilities of interactive fleet management.