How Driver Identification can Kickstart a Safer Driving Culture

Modern telematics solutions provide Fleet Managers with a comprehensive suite of reporting and diagnostic tools.

GPS tracking not only reveals the location of fleet vehicles but also offers critical insights into driver behaviour, such as excessive speeding, harsh acceleration, braking, and cornering. This data is essential for addressing unsafe driving behaviours, especially when they cause unnecessary wear and tear on fleet vehicles.

Identifying problem drivers

Often, it's just a few individuals causing the majority of infringements, incidents, and exhibiting poor driving behaviour. Without the ability to confidentially identify these employees, training efforts can be less effective. While you may know there’s a problem, pinpointing who is responsible is often difficult. Without directly linking a driver to a specific issue, it’s unlikely that behaviour will change.

Driver behaviour data helps close this information gap. By attributing each trip to an individual driver, Fleet Managers can address trends and behaviours that deviate from accepted standards.

GPS tracking provides a wealth of data about fleet vehicle usage. While it may be tempting to focus on individual instances of speeding, excessive acceleration or braking, it is rarely practical. Looking at long-term trends is far more powerful.

While speeding is never a good idea, there are occasional instances where it may be considered acceptable. For example, overtaking a tractor on a highway, or of slightly drifting above the speed limit before correcting. Penalising drivers for single instances of speeding can have a detrimental impact on organisational culture and attitudes towards GPS tracking. At the end of the day, you want every employee to want to drive safely. A punitive approach is rarely the right solution.

However, if the GPS data identifies a regular pattern of behaviour over a period of weeks or months, it can indicate the need for proactive action. Trends, rather than isolated events, are a much stronger call to action. When analysing driver behaviour, it's important to consider the human factor.

Dashboards: Making assessing individual performance easy

Having data on individual employee performance is irrelevant unless you can analyse it for key insights. We know Fleet Managers are incredibly time-poor; trawling through data points is a low priority. That’s where Smartrak’s Dashboard comes in.

Smartrak’s Dashboard* provides a range of ready-to-digest insights on fleet performance. What’s more, it provides a breakdown on individual driving performance through our Driver Score. This draws upon various data sources and uses a custom-designed formula to score individual drivers.

At a glance, you can see exactly who in your organisation is doing well and who might need additional training and support. What’s more, once you’ve seen the overall snapshot, you can dive deeper into the data in order to truly understand the issues driving these scores. This helps guide your organisation towards a safer driving culture, with data being the driving enabler.

Fostering healthy competition with Driver Scores

Another way to use the data from our Driver Score metric is as a foundation for internal competitions. Friendly rivalries between departments can promote a positive safety culture, where peers encourage one another to do better. Breaking the Driver Score down either by an individual team or department has the potential to foster a sense of healthy competition.

By merging individual scores into a larger ‘team score’ you negate instances where individuals are singled out for their poor performance. Instead, the competition provides a positive environment that can encourage individuals to improve their driving behaviour, potentially further motivated by a bonus or reward.

As long as the focus is on celebrating success, rather than punishing individuals who aren’t currently performing at their best, a competition can help kickstart a positive, safer, driving culture within your organisation.

Building a safer driving culture with GPS and driver identification

Combining GPS tracking with driver identification in Smartrak provides organisations with the ability to identify and address behaviours that lie outside accepted norms. By doing so, it provides an opportunity to kickstart a safer driving culture that can be championed by all staff. At the end of the day, a safer driving culture ensures staff avoid accidents and can go home safely to their families.

* The Driver Safety Score will only appear for customers using RRS (real road speed) and driver ID; the Overspeed widgets will only appear if a customer has RRS; the Pool Utilisation widget will only appear for those who have Smartrak Pool Booking; and the Emissions widget will not appear for Australian customers.

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Find out how we can help your organisation create a safer driving culture.

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