Whether you’ve spent time finding the perfect company car or have recently invested in a shipping fleet to transport your products across the country, road safety is a must for your employees. If they are going to spend most of their day travelling to meet clients or make deliveries, you must identify the most effective ways to keep your team safe while driving.
Outline Safety Procedures
Safety procedures for travelling employees should be a given. In the simplest form, you need to remind staff not to speed or drive recklessly, even if they are running late. Along with this, policies regarding seatbelts and ignoring (or avoiding) distractions, will also benefit your employees while they are driving. This all sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many employers ignore these basic policies. Failing to recognise and outline such policies can put your employee and driver at risk, as they are not covered under specific insurance details.
Maintain Vehicles
Vehicle maintenance is also a must for people who drive for work regularly. It doesn’t take a mechanic to understand why a car or lorry will experience substantial wear and tear the more it is driven, so you should carry out regular checkups to keep it in the best condition. You will also need to consider possible cost versus maintenance fees. Buying a reliable vehicle from a trusted used car supermarket is a good place to start, as this minimises the initial cost while still providing a dependable set of wheels for your employees to take them up and down the motorway.
Train Your Employees
You wouldn’t use other types of heavy machinery if you didn’t know how to operate it, so why would a car be different? Make a point to hire candidates who already know how to drive to save yourself extra costs. If an employee wants to start travelling for work, you can ensure they learn everything they need to know by looking at the average cost of driving lessons and consider if you want to pay in full or split the cost. For other vehicles, like lorries, specialist training is also available to guarantee safety, especially for motorway driving, which can be intimidating for first-time drivers.
Monitor Performance
Many employers don’t know that it is legal to monitor driver performance in company cars. This isn’t because you don’t trust your drivers, but more to give you peace of mind when driving. Monitoring their performance also allows you to check metrics to judge efficiency while still staying safe, and can also highlight if they break down or are stuck in traffic. Some employees may not be comfortable with this, at least not at first, but as long as you keep their data safe and only use the information for your company, there is nothing wrong with it.
On the Road
Operating a delivery service or a company that regularly ventures out of the office to meet clients can keep your employees engaged and save them from the humdrum monotony of the office. However, as they are not always with you, you must find other ways to guarantee their safety. So, consider these approaches when reevaluating your policies.
