Educating drivers on safe driving behaviours
Driver behaviour has a direct influence on fuel efficiency and maintenance costs. Additionally, for businesses dealing with customer service and transportation, how drivers drive on the road can both, directly and indirectly, impact your firm’s reputation. Skyfy shares a few reasons on how you can get your drivers to drive safer, better and more efficient.
- Study the current performance of your drivers
Examine the current data on driving performance from Skyfy’s vehicle tracking system to identify any problems. Harsh acceleration? Harsh braking? All these can be retrieved from our system effortlessly for you to analyse. This also allows you to think about some practical steps on how to improve.
- Set targets for your drivers
It is crucial to give drivers a clear idea of their driving performance and set targets for them to achieve. For instance, you can set a series of minimum standards for fuel consumption, speeding, harsh steering, sudden braking, revving and idling. Benchmarking against industry peers or across the fleet will ensure that the targets set are realistic and that driving performance meets predefined standards.
- Share your plans with senior management
You can consider getting buy-in from both senior management and drivers. Furthermore, it will be good to outline the improvements you hope to see and set a realistic time frame to see it happen. Leadership is an important factor in transforming behaviour, with managers and drivers alike. Capable fleet managers can identify where incentives for drivers can be given, such as through healthy competition and rewards.
- Share your plans with drivers
You need to involve drivers in discussions and be transparent with them to ensure that they understand where you’re coming from. It is also vital that the driver performance scheme that you want to implement is taken positively and not perceived as something to penalize your drivers with.
You can also highlight the benefits of driving more efficiently to drivers, such as improved safety. Explain how a stable driving style is more fuel-efficient than speeding or stop-start driving, and outline the subsequent benefits. This can also be tied to their personal performance objectives.
- Identify the problem drivers
Contrast current vs target performance figures across your whole fleet to draw up a league table to identify the best and poorest performing drivers. Publishing this can be a powerful message.
- Address problem drivers
By going through driver reports with Skyfy’s vehicle tracking system, you can consider conducting targeted training for your problem drivers. This could empower them to adopt a better driving style.
You will also be notified through Skyfy’s system when drivers perform unsafe acts such as speeding or aggressive driving. For drivers that are constantly driving in an unsafe manner, you can organize meetings and get to the root of the problem by raising it up to the drivers.
- Give recognition to improvements and good driving behaviour
To encourage your drivers to keep up the good performance, you can consider giving incentives such as extra holidays, cash, vouchers, or eligibility for a vehicle upgrade. Most of the time, however, this is not necessary as competition can work equally well to achieve the same results.
Whatever you decide to choose, clear communication and feedback on progress will get the best results. It is also good to identify particularly well-behaved drivers and use them as advocates to share success stories.
- Share results effectively
Giving weekly or monthly updates on individual or team results will enable drivers to see how they are progressing. To save time, use automated reports such as the one Skyfy’s vehicle tracking system provides.
This helps to advocate a culture of continuous improvement, which makes improving driver behaviour proactive rather than reactive.
- Review and refine
To measure the success of your programme, set clear timelines that are linked to the overall company goals (quarterly, half yearly or annually). Once the initial targets have been met, you can re-set the baseline to maintain the position and consequently apply steady growth.