• Compliance alone does not translate into safety. Involve all employees in risk management.
• Incorporate rewards, comprehensive safety training, and discipline into your overall safety program.
• Vehicle maintenance is critically important to any motor carrier safety program.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) completed a survey of 148 of the nation’s safest motor carriers on which safety management practices are work for them. The survey, titled Best Highway Safety Practices: A Survey About Safety Management Practices Among the Safest Motor Carriers was done by the Supply Chain Management Center at the University of Maryland’s R.H. Smith School of Business.

Safety Goals

With regard to setting your safety goals, keep in mind:

1. Compliance does not necessarily translate into safety, and
2. Employee/driver involvement is a critical element of any motor carrier safety program.
3. Establish a comprehensive driver training program that includes initial, refresher (annual), and remedial safety training for all drivers.
4. Incorporate rewards, safety training, and discipline into your overall safety program.
5. Vehicle maintenance is critically important to any motor carrier safety program.

Therefore, don’t comply with the relevant FMCSRs for the sake of compliance alone, but rather use the regulations as the framework for your overall safety programs. In addition, make sure one of your overall safety goals is to seek out input and feedback from all employees.

Safety starts with the people (current and future) you surround yourself with. Therefore, your safety goals should incorporate two very important concepts:

1. The most important characteristics with regard to driver applicants involve past driving performance with a special emphasis on alcohol and drug violations and chargeable crashes; and
2. Leading carriers have established (written) formal driving hiring standards that place the greatest emphasis on an applicant’s safe driving record.

Driver hiring practices

Driver characteristics — Carriers were asked to evaluate the importance of 10 driver characteristics when making a hiring decision. The results illustrate that few differences exist between attractive characteristics for employees and owner operators.

The three most important characteristics all involve the individual’s past driving performance with a special emphasis on alcohol or drug violations and chargeable crashes. Age and training were less important compared to the applicant’s safety record. Other important considerations were driving experience, speeding and traffic violations, as well as recommendations from other carriers. Carriers are most interested in hiring drivers that are honest, reliable, and self-disciplined.

Assessing applicants — Seventy percent of all companies (90 percent of large carriers) use safety-related criteria to evaluate driver applicants. Ninety percent or more of carriers use drug testing, past traffic records, on-road tests for evaluating driver behavior, and license qualification checks as effective means of assessing the safety risk of driver applicants.

Written hiring policies — The most common criteria for establishing driver safety require a review of the applicant’s past driving record and establishing a maximum number of moving violations and crashes that disqualify an applicant. Overall, a higher percentage of the large-size carriers than of carriers overall included these safety-related criteria clearly or very clearly in their written hiring policies.

Driver Training Practices — The results suggest that pre- and in-service training programs for employees and owner-operators are strategic safety investments for companies, not viewed as a cost. Close to 90 percent of all carriers require training programs; the majority of which require 1–2 weeks of training.

Employees appreciate the relevance of training programs and their importance in maintaining safe carrier performance.

Over 57 percent of all carriers indicated that both pre-service and in-service driver training has an equal impact on the company’s highway safety performance. However, more companies consider in-service driver training to be more critical than pre-service training.

Overall, training is very important to the safety leaders surveyed. In addition, peer-to-peer training among drivers is strongly supported. Most carriers (80–90 percent) train drivers on the following subjects:

• Pretrip and post-trip inspections
• Federal safety regulations
• Accident notification
• Hours-of-service regulations
• Driver disciplinary policies and dispatch procedures

An increasing number of carriers and driving schools are effectively using driving simulators to provide an initial skills assessment, basic training before on-road training, and refresher training.

Encouraging and Reinforcing Safe Driving Behavior — Motor carriers rely on two basic management principles

1. Safety rewards, and
2. Driver discipline.

Safety rewards — Over 75 percent of all respondent carriers have safety award programs for individual drivers. Safe drivers get promoted over unsafe drivers in over 89 percent of companies.

Safety awards are also presented in order to encourage and reinforce safe driving. Awards are issued on a monthly, quarterly, and an annual basis with annual being the most common.

In most cases a variety of rewards are used, such as verbal praise, public recognition, congratulatory letters from management, safety decorations, safety banquets, cash, and merchandise.

Awards are most frequently based on established criteria or driver accomplishments, such as a lack of crashes, violations, or traffic convictions during a specified time period.

Driver discipline — Carriers feel that disciplining drivers is more important or equally as important as rewards in encouraging and reinforcing safe driving behavior.

Carriers discipline or coach drivers for poor safety performance when drivers violate Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, violate company safety policies, or demonstrate generally unsafe driving performance. Maintaining standards is essential to minimizing risk. Do not allow exceptions for the most productive drivers for example. Everyone meets the same safety standards.

Types of disciplinary actions include coaching, verbal warnings, written warnings, and termination of employment when necessary.

Lesson learned: The above results suggest that carriers feel that safety training, reward, and discipline are all effective for reinforcing safe behavior.

Managing and Monitoring Driver Activities — Results of the survey in this area show that companies use a variety of technologies to monitor driver performance and promote safe driving.

Companies manage driver fatigue by encouraging drivers to refuse dispatches if they do not feel alert enough to handle the drive, equip trucks so they are easier to handle, and provide uninterrupted break times for drivers.

Managing Vehicle Maintenance — With regard to vehicle maintenance, approximately 90 percent of carriers considered cost as a nonissue when it comes to keeping their vehicles defect-free and deploying a defect-free fleet is the most important thing they do to ensure vehicle safety while out on the highway.

Since preventative maintenance is critical to deploying a safe fleet, 80 percent of carriers rarely need to conduct unscheduled maintenance.

Your safety effort needs to consider virtually every aspect of your operation — including vehicle maintenance. Your DVIR, annual inspection, and other scheduled maintenance and repair systems must ensure your vehicles are in safe working order at all times.