Often, the usual approach to improving driver behaviour is to analyse each specific overspeed event and send a notification through to the person's manager or to the individual themselves. It is hoped by many managers that this will generate change or at least cover health and safety obligations should there be an investigation.
However, only tracking and managing speed events takes a narrow view of driver behaviour and doesn't take into account the causes of poor driving and ingrained behaviours.
Instead, companies should be looking at trends and analysing drivers over time to proactively address and manage health and safety issues.
Imagine a company has a predetermined threshold for triggering a speeding warning of 15%, and a driver with a long history of good driving meets that threshold. Does that driver warrant greater attention than a driver who continually travels at 7-10% over the speed limit? The latter driver may not reach the company’s threshold, but they are potentially creating other issues for the company such as increased tyre wear, poor public perception of the company, increased likelihood of speeding tickets, and more vehicle maintenance costs.
There are also drivers who never speed but are a hazard on the road due to their poor driving ability. Constant heavy breaking, acceleration and hard cornering should create as much of a concern for the fleet and health and safety managers as speeding.
It is much more informative to look at driving behaviours over time. By extracting driver behaviour information from Smartrak's reporting suite a fleet manager can set up trend analysis for drivers over time. Someone that continually scores in the bottom of the continuum should then be targeted for driver education. Someone with a blip here and there would not normally show up continually at the bottom of the list. In those instances, there may be some sort of information flow to them, but at a lower touch point than a continual offender.
Also important is to use more than just data from a GPS system for driver behaviour improvement and training. Telematics gives you a view of how people are driving at a given point in time, however, there should be ongoing training around the safe operation of a vehicle and driver training. This can take many forms, some examples include video tutorials when a new vehicle type enters the fleet, driver safety days, off-road driving training and vehicle-based tip sheets. As technology in vehicles evolves (lane departure warnings, autonomous braking etc.) training is becoming even more important.
By looking at driver behaviour from a more holistic perspective your organisation will have a history of information showing trends over time if a regulator does come to call. You will be supplementing the information from Smartrak with your own driver education programmes and showing that over time you have been improving the performance of your drivers, leading to a safer fleet overall and a safer workplace. Don't settle for a data-only approach and make sure that any initiative is holistic and encompasses a range of solutions.
