Maintaining the safety of your fleet is a crucial part of operating a successful service or delivery business. Reckless driving by your employees can hurt your business’s reputation, cause major financial losses and pose risks to other drivers on the road. In contrast, safe driving establishes trust with clients and helps reduce the chance of accidents.
How to Improve Driver Safety in Your Fleet
How do you protect assets and team members who are constantly on the move? With advanced vehicle tracking solutions, you can improve your fleet safety and ensure each driver follows best practices. Here are the top five ways that you can improve safety with fleet management.
1. Develop a Strong Safety Culture
One of the most effective ways to improve fleet safety using fleet tracking software is establishing a strong safety culture right from the start. Doing so will set clear expectations that everyone can follow and establish baseline rules regarding the behavior you expect from your drivers, maintenance teams, fleet managers and administrative staff.
Some of the ways you can use tracking devices to develop a stronger safety culture include:
Establishing a policy: Safety needs to be at the root of every decision you make. Set limits on driver hours, perform background checks on new hires and encourage people to speak up when they spot an issue.
Creating accountability: Let your drivers know you are monitoring them. Fleet tracking devices take the guesswork out of finding out what happens on the road. Review trip histories and address anything that gets your attention.
Offering rewards: The data you collect using fleet tracking solutions will tell you who follows the rules. Incentivizing safe behavior using a reward system is an excellent way to motivate your drivers and others to do the right thing.
Read Next: Distracted Driving Solutions
2. Monitor Driving Habits
Fleet software allows you to monitor company vehicles from almost any location on a computer desktop or mobile device.
Some of the detailed driver information you can view using this technology includes:
Where: You can monitor real-time vehicle location and current speed.
When: You can see customizable reports featuring historical driver insights.
How: You can look out for behaviors like speeding, braking, cornering and jackrabbit starts.
Monitoring drivers’ habits will give you insight into which employees are driving safely and which need further training or incentives. If members of your team are putting themselves or others at risk, knowing when and where it happens can help you take steps to correct the behavior.
3. Find the Safest Routes
With fleet tracking devices and software, you can view past and current trips using a map overlay to see where your vehicles are and where they’ve been. You can use the data in multiple ways to place your drivers on the safest possible routes:
Planning a safe trip: You can review the map block-by-block to create a customized route for your drivers. Decide which roads to use, which neighborhoods to pass through and where they should stop for fuel.
Responding to emergencies: Real-time monitoring capability means you can make snap decisions to route drivers around traffic, road hazards and other emergencies. And if your vehicle breaks down, you’ll know right where it is.
Reducing road time: The more time drivers spend on the road, the more exposure they have to the potential for an accident. Fleet tracking solutions help you find the fastest and shortest routes to take, shaving unnecessary miles and reducing driver risk.
Prevent driver fatigue: Knowing how much time your drivers are spending on the road, how many miles they’re driving and how long the engine is running will help you make sure drivers are working a reasonable schedule and taking breaks.
Read Next: Elements of an Effective Fleet Safety Program
4. Prioritize Vehicle Maintenance
When considering how you can improve fleet safety, one option is to implement defensive driving programs or provide positive reinforcement to safe drivers. At the same time, it can be easy to forget the importance of vehicle maintenance.
GPS tracking solutions allow you to receive alerts when it’s time to schedule important preventative maintenance and inspections for company vehicles. Keeping up with regular maintenance is much safer and more cost-effective than waiting for a major mechanical failure.
Some of the ways to improve your fleet safety using telematics data for maintenance operations include:
Instant alerts: If one of your vehicles is due for maintenance, you’ll know right away so you can schedule service.
Historical records: Over time, you will build up historical records for vehicles that you can use to identify maintenance trends.
Maintenance documentation: Fleet tracking solutions let technicians upload vehicle maintenance information directly to the cloud.
5. Collect Safety Data
Tracking patterns in your safety data can help you make better decisions about changes and improvements to implement in your business. Fleet management software and devices make it easier to collect and store safety information about your employees each day. In addition, you can choose to keep a record of accidents, tickets and reports from other drivers or clients.
By gathering all this data over time, you can track patterns in individual driver safety and overall safety within your company. This insight can help you implement new strategies and identify ways to better train employees exhibiting poor driving behavior. Enhance Your Fleet with Track Your Truck.
Safety is a major part of running a reliable, trustworthy company. Track Your Truck software offers the latest and most accurate mobile and desktop tracking technology so you can improve fleet safety and run a safer, more productive business. Our systems are certified and activated before shipment, so all you need to do is set up the components, install the software and get started.
Contact us today to request a quote if you’re interested in learning more about what our products can do for you. We serve a variety of diverse industries, providing efficient, customized solutions to accommodate any business requirements.
