Having a roster of safe and sensible drivers is paramount to the success of a fleet. It can improve your staff retention rates, reduce costs, and best of all give you peace of mind that your drivers are being safe on the road. This doesn’t mean that you need to go out and find the best drivers you possibly can – after all, no one is born with the ability to drive. You just need to invest a little time and energy into giving your drivers a targeted training program, which is guaranteed to see results. Here are 8 step guide to improve driver behavior.
Learn more about how GPS software helps lone workers in Australia.
1. Analyze your current fleet strategy:
Analyze current performance data from your fleet management software which you need to begin with. This software can provide a detailed report on each driver’s performance using data collected on their previous journeys based on harsh acceleration, hard braking and cornering. These days driver behavior is widely been used in insurance telematics or Usage based insurance. Using this information, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of each driver and choose the start point from which to improve based on driver scoring.
2. Set Goals to Achieve:
Give drivers a clear idea of where their driving performance should be by setting series of minimum standards for fuel consumption, harsh cornering and sudden braking, speeding, revving and idling in fleet management system. Bench marking against industry peers or indeed across the fleet, will ensure targets are realistic and that performance meets predefined standards.
3. Share plan with Management:
Let your management know about your plan and outline what you hope to improve, by when. Leadership is important when it comes to making changes, so make sure everyone supports your plan. Analyze fleet management application data, if you plan on giving incentives for good driving behaviors, show senior management how a small investment in your drivers can have long-term benefits through healthy competition/or rewards by demonstrating how financial incentives can be self-funding.
4. Share your vision with Drivers:
Involve drivers in early discussions and be transparent to ensure clarity. It is vital that any driver performance scheme is implemented in a positive way and not seen as something to punish your drivers. Make sure your plan is being shown in a positive light and highlight how it will be beneficial to them while using fleet management system.
5. Identify your Good & Bad Drivers:
Traxroot's driver behavior and score cards helps in increasing operational efficiency. Set your on appropriate thresholds to determine what driving behavior is considered to be harsh and generate driver score cards through our fleet maintenance software. Compare the data of each driver’s current target performance figures to draw a league table to identify the best and poorest performing drivers and turn the plan into a fun competition by publishing. Learn more about how fleet software helps in monitoring vehicle speed.
6. Address Bad Drivers:
Consider the benefits of targeted training for your problem drivers and empower them to adopt a better driving style by providing tools that feedback driving behavior via fleet management software for example. These give drivers live alerts to highlight when they could be adopting a safer and more fuel-efficient driving style.
7. Reward Good Driving Behavior:
You may want to consider incentives such as extra holidays, cash, vouchers or eligibility for a vehicle upgrade, though simply recognizing progress and success can often be enough reward to keep people interested. But in many cases this is not necessary and recognition and competition can work just as well to get the same results. Show your drivers how they have improved through regular updates to the league table. Consider providing tailored support for drivers who have specific areas that aren’t improving. Whatever you choose, clear communication and feedback on progress while using Fleet Management system will get you the best results. It’s also great to identify particularly engaged drivers and use them as advocates to share success stories. Explore 11 things to keep in your vehicle which can help during an emergency or break down.
8. Review & Refine:
Set clear timelines to measure program success against predefined KPIs, linked to the overall company goals (quarterly, half yearly or annually). Once the initial expectations have been achieved, re-set the baseline to maintain the position and then apply steady growth. Feedback to stakeholders on the overall results of the initiative. This leads to a continual improvement strategy.
In order to see a live demo of how driver behavior works and can benefit your company, kindly contact us.