Idelic’s Hayden Cardiff sat down with Tim Smith of Pivotal Fleet Solutions and Geoff Topping of Challenger Motor Freight for the webinar “The Danger of Disparate Departments: Bringing Safety, Recruiting, & Operations Together.” In it, they discussed how fleets can break out of siloed departments and start preventing crashes and retaining drivers.
During the webinar, which you can watch a full recording of here, they highlighted three things every fleet should understand about bringing their departments together.
#1: Conflicting Short-Term Goals Can Harm Overall Productivity
While every department should have objectives to improve their fleet’s profitability, oftentimes, one department’s short-term goals might conflict with another’s. For example, an Operations team might encourage drivers to improve their on-time-performance with one message, which may conflict with the Safety team’s message about putting safety first, ultimately harming both safety and operations and potentially frustrating drivers.
The solution: Fleets should set broad, corporate-level goals that define success for the fleet as a whole, and then build all of their department goals off of them. In this system, every department’s objectives align with a higher-level company objective. This ensures that at every level, all of a fleet’s objectives are in alignment.
#2: Fleets Must Coordinate All Changes to Department Policy
When fleets don’t coordinate policy changes between departments, their liability is likely to rise. As an example, if a new-hire has a particularly bad crash, a fleet’s Recruiting department might respond by raising their hiring standards, while the fleet’s Safety department might respond by improving their training program without changing their minimum retention standards. As a result, that fleet can now be retaining drivers with a driving history that would not meet their new hiring qualifications, which can be exploited by a plaintiff’s attorney in court.
The solution: Fleets should have quarterly meetings between department leadership and HR staff to coordinate all changes to department policies, ensuring standards are never misaligned or in conflict with one another.
#3: Siloed Technology Leads to Siloed Departments
When a fleet’s technology systems are disparate from one another, it is much harder for departments to share data to pursue common objectives. For example, when a fleet’s Safety team assigns training to drivers but doesn’t have visibility into how their Operations team is executing the training assignments, it can be incredibly difficult for Safety to ensure training is being properly carried out and that its effectiveness is maximized.
The Solution: Fleets must consolidate their systems into a single platform, ensuring departments can easily share data and are held accountable to one another.
The Tool You Need to Bring Departments Together
While it may seem difficult to bring your fleet’s departments together, fortunately, there are tools that can help.
The Idelic Safety Suite® is the industry’s leading driver management platform, which brings all of a fleet’s departments together to work out of the same centralized command center, giving them the visibility and tools they need to create processes using all of a fleet’s data and departments.
If you’d like to learn more about how Safety Suite can help your fleet avoid the dangers of disparate departments, watch a 2-minute demo or sign up for a deep-dive here.