In a webinar on reducing insurance rates, Cottingham & Butler’s Chris Vogel explained why fleets with a strong safety culture receive better rates from carriers:
“[They] stay involved, actively seek feedback, and genuinely care. They don’t view Joe Smith as Truck #54. They know Joe Smith. Because of that, those fleets get a lot better results.”
Unfortunately, with insurance rates skyrocketing across the trucking industry, it’s hard for an insurance carrier to take a fleet’s word that they have a strong safety culture—they care about results. Accordingly, fleets should prove the safety programs that are the foundation of their culture will lead to sustainable improvements. Fortunately, there are two steps any fleet can follow to do so.
Step 1: Improve Engagement with Drivers
While there are a number of ways fleets can enhance their safety culture, chief among these is improving engagement with their drivers. When managers directly engage with their employees, actively solicit feedback, and act on that feedback, drivers are more likely to see that leadership takes safety seriously and that it is everyone’s responsibility.
So how can fleets improve their engagement? Here are two strategies fleets can pursue include:
- Implement regular, recurring touchpoints with drivers.
Touchpoints done monthly or quarterly help managers connect with their drivers and push out top-down safety messaging to everyone in their fleet.
- Use structured channels for feedback.
Structured channels for discussion, such as driver surveys or leadership town halls, enable fleets to keep a finger on the pulse of their driver population and regularly engage with them.
Step 2: Document and Share Your Engagement Activities
Once a fleet has boosted its driver engagement, the next step is to prove it. Though insurance carriers don’t have the time to sit in on a fleet’s driver check-ins, they are very interested in the data a fleet has surrounding them.
By implementing a process that schedules and documents driver touchpoints, analyzes survey data, and reports on town hall attendance and discussions, fleets can show insurers their engagement data in the same way they share their telematics data today. Even better, because most fleets don’t keep track of these interactions, this gives fleets who do catalog their engagement a leg up in a competitive market.
So how can fleets best record and act on their engagement data?
The Best Way to Document and Share Engagement Activities
The Idelic Safety Suite® is the most comprehensive driver management platform in the trucking industry, pulling in data from all of a fleet’s technology systems into a single location.
Safety Suite automates your check-ins and sends notifications to managers when their weekly calls are approaching, while also displaying notes taken during previous calls. In this way, Safety Suite provides fleets with the tools they need to improve their driver engagement, elevate their safety culture, and prove it to insurers.
If you’d like to learn more about how Safety Suite has helped fleets like Pitt Ohio reduce their claims costs by 48% and improve retention by 43%, watch a 2-minute demo or sign up for a deep dive here.