Your accident prevention program also needs to proactively address individual drivers who demonstrate unsafe driving behavior based on telematics or video, cited for acts of unsafe driving, or are involved in accidents.

Regardless of how thorough your driver selection and screening process or comprehensive your driver training program are, you will have drivers in your fleet that are either:

1. Unwilling, or
2. Unable to drive safely — consistently over time.

How do you go about identifying these drivers? In the case of drivers unwilling to drive safely, watch for repeat unsafe driving behavior and being unwilling to accept responsibility for correcting behavior. These drivers may not be a fit for your organization. Follow your progressive discipline policy and do not hesitate to release a driver unwilling to operate safely, no matter how productive they may be.

Along with coaching drivers based on telematics data, video clips, hours-of-service violations, improper vehicle inspections or use of Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIRs), you must take into account:

• Negative road observation (NRO) — Your drivers should be expected to drive in a defensive manner and exercise road courtesy at all times. Legitimate observations of aggressive, careless, or reckless behavior, need to be counseled, retrained when necessary and documented. Drivers involved in repeated NROs are demonstrating a pattern of unacceptable and unsafe driving behavior and should be subject to appropriate corrective and/or disciplinary action.

• Multiple moving violations — You are required to pull your drivers’ motor vehicle record (MVR) at least every 12 months. You are also required to review the MVRs along with all data you may have indicating unsafe behavior. Take note of any convictions of moving violations such as speeding, improper lane change, etc. Although these incidents may be isolated — momentary lapses in judgement — they could be indicators of unsafe driving habits. A single speeding ticket might represent hundreds, if not thousands, of times the driver was speeding but did not get caught.

Behavior

You are trying to find and correct poor behaviors. Too many safety professionals only look at outcomes that impact the safety rating. Accidents, violations, and citations are a good starting point for a behavior-based system, but they should not be the only measures as these are reactive. Whenever the driver is involved in any occurrence involving a variation from what is normal and expected behavior, the safety professional should be aware of it. The key is to proactively monitor behaviors, not just the negative outcomes.

If the behavioral trait that led to the occurrence is allowed to continue unchecked, the driver inevitably will be involved in a crash. Defining poor behavior and looking at the drivers’ performance may provide insight into which drivers are taking unnecessary risks, becoming “short” tempered, inattentive, or generally unsafe.

The key is developing a system that tracks overall driver performance and intervenes when pre-selected incidents occur or a performance threshold is met. In short, a safety professional needs to develop a system that catches behavioral problems before they lead to a crash. With the advent of video-event recorders or “dash-cams”, proactive behavior management is much more feasible to implement and manage on an ongoing basis.

The first steps with implementing the system is measuring and tracking. Always remember the adage “what is monitored and measured is fixed,” so use everything you can access as measures. As mentioned, if a driver receives a violation, citation, customer complaint, operations complaint, or negative driving observation do not just deal with it by itself, use it as a measure in the system as well.

Telemetry data off the engine control module (ECM) or video-event data from cameras can record unsafe driving behaviors such as:

• Hard-braking,
• Excessive speed including violations of stop signs and speed limits with “smart dash cams” that can recognize specific signs,
• Hard cornering,
• Lack of seat belt use,
• Lane drift,
• Following too close,
• Falling asleep behind the wheel, and
• Distracted driving (cell phone use and more).

There are many other behaviors that if not corrected increase your potential liability. The key to using the data effectively is to have an exception reporting system that allows the most serious events to be prioritized for meaningful action to correct and eliminate the behavior.

Your safety management processes must account for and act on all data that you “should have been aware of” because that is how you will be judged in court when the plaintiff’s lawyer is attempting to prove that you were guilty of negligent supervision or negligent entrustment.

Avoiding claims of negligence when using safety systems

The key with these systems is to act on the most critical events and do not ignore the data once you have the systems installed. The systems are only effective if carriers have policies and procedures that are clearly understood and executed to support proper use.

Carriers are judged by what they should have known, not what they took the time to review and act on. Carriers must avoid negligent supervision or negligent retention which are commonly asserted by a plaintiff’s attorney in their attempt to prove that the carrier did not live up to their “duty to act” and allowed a dangerous situation to persist. In short, coach the negative driver behavior in a timely manner, document any coaching or progressive discipline to correct the behaviors, and only retain the videos and corrective action documentation until the behavior is corrected.

You don’t want to retain corrective action information, after the behavior has been definitively corrected, beyond your document retention policy for disciplinary documents.

If you put a driver on a 90-day action plan based on hard-braking events and the driver has successfully avoided hard-brake events for 90 days, it is best to follow your company document retention and corrective action policies. You may have a policy that says, “keep everything for employment plus three years” then adhere to that, and if you have a policy to destroy disciplinary documents for one year after the behavior is corrected, that is what you should consistently do for every driver. However, never destroy or attempt to conceal any information once a major accident has occurred as you could easily be found to have engaged in “spoliation” or destruction of evidence.

To increase acceptance of the electronic safety systems, especially the driver-facing cameras, carriers have adopted a positive behavior reward system to add money to drivers’ paychecks while greatly reducing risk costs.