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01/07/05 Fleet World – Safe in the knowledge…
Ian McKenzie, business development director at FMG Support, looks at some of the issues facing fleets in the light of impending corporate manslaughter legislation.
Fleet safety and employers’ duty of care is the industry’s most emotive issue. The legislative landscape continues to be dominated by increased health and safety regulation, culminating with the introduction of the corporate manslaughter bill, which was a key point in the Queen’s speech and will be a focus of the new parliament. This will render companies increasing accountable for insuring the safety of both its employees and the wider public.
As with most complicated and critical issues, a wealth of opinion has been shared on how this challenge can be met head on. The complexities surrounding legal compliance, corporate well-being and a general confusion about the practicalities of ‘risk’ have caused apathy in the fleet industry and a subsequent lack of robust solutions.
Any action to minimise risk to employees is positive. However, the majority of current risk management programmes have not focused on safety but are driven by the need to meet incoming legislation and the desire to avoid litigation. Driver training programmes increased legal and physical checks for drivers, and improved maintenance standards for vehicles used for business purposes are positive first-steps, but they are inadequate as a stand-alone solution. This is often initiated by parachute-style risk management solutions, where consultants drop in and out of businesses leaving them with a quickstep and quick-fix approach to risk, ‘substantiated’ by a number of revenue-generating exercises that come with a guarantee to provide return on investment.
These solutions are fundamentally flawed and will never deliver any real, long-term benefits. Not only do they side-step the importance of embedding a culture of safety at the heart of the business, they ignore the fundamental importance of continually monitoring and evaluating data that first builds and then measures the success or failure of a programme.
Data generation lies at the heart of good safety practice; it is what drives it and provides the foundation for all solutions. Systematic recording of incidents enables managers to identify where there are areas of weakness so that they can drill down and address them. A basic example is how one company used data reporting to realise that most incidents within its sales team occurred on a Monday morning between 8am and 9am, en-route to a single location. After further exploration, it was apparent that the sales team was rushing through traffic to attend a 9am sales team meeting. By taking the basic step to move the meeting to 10am which allowed the traffic to ease and the team to be given more time to reach the destination, the number of incidents was greatly reduced. Not only does this help to fulfil duty of care for employees, but incident reduction achieves bottom-line benefits. Tangible effects on decreasing insurance claims, reduced vehicle off-road time and greater fleet efficiency can all generate substantial ROI.
However, creating a complete solution is complex without substantial management information to allow a programme to be adapted as part of a system of continuous improvement, the benefits will never be fully realised. Yet, even with all the strategic apparatus that the market has to offer, such benefits cannot be delivered unless safety is embedded at the heart of corporate culture and driven from the board. Instilling a safety mindset amongst all employees in every department and giving safety the attention that it deserves, is the first step to integrating an effective policy within the business process. If this can be achieved, the program will have stronger foundations from which to grow, which will ensure long-term legal compliance, increase profitability and most importantly will help the business fulfil its obligations of corporate well-being.
Safety must be a fundamental part of corporate strategy, viewed from a holistic perspective that is integral to the wider reaching objectives of the business. It must be planned, executed and delivered with the rigour and efforts to gain employee buy-in that are required for any other business critical initiative. It is also an opportunity for fleet managers to demonstrate how effective safety practice can positively impact on the business. By reducing incidents and therefore improving performance, it is a chance to demonstrate how fleet can significantly contribute to the overall business performance improvement process.
As health and safety issues continue to challenge every business, the fleet sector has the chance to set an example as pioneers of safety and corporate responsibility, setting a benchmark for all commerce to follow; creating solutions that are grounded in substance and go to the route of the issue; generating results that don’t just focus on compliance but are intrinsically entwined with core business strategy and profitability; and most importantly are focused on long-term safety for all employees. It is an opportunity that must be seized.
