It’s Time to Start Thinking Differently About Safety

BY SUSAN ROSE

Editor’s note: When safety is done well, it goes unnoticed—but we all know what happens when it’s not. Crafting a culture of safety at your organization is non-negotiable; your team expects that you are putting their well-being first so that they can then deliver the world-class customer service to your clients, and your clients should never have to worry about your vehicles or chauffeur. In the coming months, expect to see a lot more ink dedicated to safety from the four professionals quoted in this article.

We all looked on in horror when the devastating limousine crash killed 20 in Schoharie, New York, in 2018. The entirely preventable accident was a failure by many people and agencies, but it began and ended with a reckless owner sending an egregiously unsafe vehicle on the road with 17 passengers and a reluctant chauffeur. It stands as one of the most depraved acts in our industry’s history.

Considering the millions of incident-free trips that are provided each year, this is clearly an outlier, but it is a stark, if not painful, reminder of the duty-of-care obligation that every transportation provider has. Accidents are a sad reality of the business, but nurturing a culture of safety is what separates our industry from the illegal operators who flout the regulations and insurance requirements.

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of operators who don’t have the knowledge of the rules and regulations to establish a safety program,” says Tom Holden, who developed a compliance department while working at Rose Chauffeured Transportation before founding consulting firm Transportation Advisors. “The other side I see is that it’s put on the back burner. It’s the attitude that ‘nothing has happened all these years, and nothing is going to happen,’ and so it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

What a Culture of Safety Looks Like
All too often, operators only consider establishing an official compliance department or hiring a dedicated safety manager upon the adoption of larger DOT-regulated vehicles, but having a safety culture shouldn’t be limited to required government paperwork or vehicle size. Safety is so much more than just a weeklong chauffeur training course or pre-trip inspection sheets—it’s how you handle storage of chemicals and solvents in your office/garage or deal with standing water in your lot during the winter months or the process of removing equipment in need of repair from your fleet.

Jeff Shanker of Black Tie Transportation and chair of the American Bus Association’s Bus Industry Safety Council (BISC) has decades of experience developing and expanding safety and compliance departments on the operator level. “A bona fide culture of safety spans across every aspect of a business. Leaders tend to forget safety and compliance has a mixing bowl of entities and agencies that have oversight for the protection of employees and the general public. This includes your auto-insurance carrier; workers’ compensation carrier; state and federal entitities like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a local agency that covers storm or wastewater at your facility, your local fire inspectors; and so many others,” he says.

Joe Guinn of LBC Fleet & Compliance also works with his clients to build effective safety programs. “There has to be accountability,” he says. “You have to instill in your entire company that they have the power to affect the safety program. Even at the reservation level, if they see that a trip is booked beyond what is acceptable for [the DOT’s] Hours of Service, and it doesn’t click in their head to quote the trip with a second driver, then that affects everything else. The key is that every member of your team is empowered, is educated, and is going in the same direction.”

James Blain of PAX Training has written extensively about the importance of a culture of safety and aims to educate his clients—and the industry—on the benefits of effective and measurable training. “It’s important to make a distinction between regulatory compliance and safety,” he says. “You can be completely within the regulatory compliance requirements and still have accidents or other types of serious safety problems. Regulatory compliance aims to prevent a worst-case scenario and make the streets a generally safer place, whereas your safety program ensures that you’re reducing the risk within your company.”

He adds: “A key indicator of a strong safety program is an environment where everyone on the team feels that they can comfortably point things out if there is an issue and they know it will get resolved. You really have to make sure that everyone in the company is willing to hold everyone else accountable. For example, your dispatchers have to know what Hours of Service are and how much they can schedule a driver. Your maintenance staff has to openly communicate so that they can get ahead of small problems. A company where it is just not worth speaking up because the issue is never going to get fixed is one that is counting down to disaster.”

Overcoming Excuses
While it’s tempting to think of your safety department as just another expense, it can actually lead to savings and even enhanced profits. When it’s woven into all departments of your business, it can help to reduce the number of serious and minor accidents (on the road and at the office); decrease client complaints; tamp down on extra maintenance, especially from lead-footed or aggressively braking chauffeurs; and even curb costs of one of the biggest pain points of late: insurance renewals.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re running sedans, SUVs, Sprinters, or full-size motorcoaches; right now, we are in one of the most litigious environments I have seen in my 10 years in the industry,” says Blain. “A single incident can very quickly snowball into a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. Although there’s a lot of talk about telematics, cameras, and other tools, all of those are completely reactive. Companies are willing to invest the money into telematics, but many of them don’t monitor incidents, and more importantly, aren’t proactively training their team using tools like PAX to try and keep those accidents from ever happening in the first place.”

“If your team is crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, you’re going to see a culture change,” says Holden. “When you’re doing it right on the safety side, then drivers are paying attention. If you’re using tech like cameras, they’re actually going to perform better, whether they’re driving a Sprinter, sedan, or motorcoach, because they’re more focused on quality through that safety department.”

“A heathy safety program is one that promotes constant collaboration and communication that is clearly fostered by leadership and transferred across company culture.” – Jeff Shanker of Black Tie Transportation

“The largest hurdles tend to be ‘what will the return on investment be’ and ‘when will I see it?’” says Shanker. “While the ROI may not be seen immediately, it will pay dividends and multiples over time as revenue will be retained (less to pay out for repairs), and the company reputation will gain respect and admiration by the community and its clients.” He adds: “Not having a culture of safety bodes poorly across all aspects of a business, from lack of employee motivation and morale to the ‘big one,’ an incident where local or even national media are involved. This can cause irreparable harm resulting in the loss of your business.”

“It is so important to start off right because it’s so much harder to go back and correct bad behavior after you’ve already done it one way for so long,” says Guinn.

Getting Started
Whether you’re hiring in-house staff, using a third-party compliance company (including those listed here), or a hybrid model that works for you, there are numerous people who should be a part of creating and implementing your safety program. In addition to your team—who must have total buy-in to make it successful—other helpful parties include your attorney, your local DOT office and inspectors, maintenance or body shops, OSHA, and especially your insurance providers, who often have an extensive library of resources as well as a vested interest in your safety program.

“There are many companies that are very successful in doing it themselves, whether they’re a small operator or a much larger one that can afford to have several people in the safety department. I know plenty of small operators who work with us for drug and alcohol testing, but they handle all the compliance themselves. They are diligent. If you have that type of personality, then by all means, you can do this job. It’s not rocket science. But sometimes an owner can feel more comfortable if they hire an outside firm, because there’s nothing that firm is going to cover up or overlook,” says Holden.

“In my opinion, a safety person should ultimately be in-house, and once a company gets into the bus game, this needs to be an in-house position. Many organizations will initially use a safety department person in multiple positions where they also drive, educate other employees on a variety of topics, and are used for dispatching or reservations. This may be a good idea to help justify the costs, though they shouldn’t be short-sighted with the actual role and responsibility that a safety person will ultimately perform and set the company up for greatness,” says Shanker. “If they decide to work with a consultant, they should choose one that is best suited for their operation and establishes an open line of communication, recognizing that they may not always hear what they want from the consultant, but knowing that they have their back and are one of their best resources.”

“One of the biggest mistakes operators make is not being sincere in what they’re doing. People will put together a beautiful safety program with great intentions but then there’s no actual implementation or accountability. Next thing you know, they’re chasing fires, and that safety program that they just created gets stuck underneath a stack of other things,” says Guinn.

If you’re just getting started or can’t afford another hire just yet, Guinn does recommend that safety be spearheaded by your head dispatcher, mechanic, or even sales manager, although he warns that one position may have conflicting goals: “If you put your operations manager in charge of safety and compliance, and all they care about is making sure that the passenger is picked up on time, then safety items are going to get overlooked.”

“You have to instill in your entire company that they have the power to affect the safety program.” – Joe Guinn of LBC Fleet & Compliance

Blain echoes Guinn’s sentiments. “There are two major mistakes I see operators make. The first is they assume that a lack of accidents means safety. In many cases, you have people who are driving aggressively or following too closely who will drive for a long time without any kind of issue, but when they do it’s a major one,” adding that it’s critical to correct these “wake-up calls” before they become bigger problems. “The other thing I see is companies that have a safety program but don’t enforce it. If you have a policy that a chauffeur is terminated if caught texting and driving, that means you actually have to terminate that person, even if they’re your best chauffeur. If that person gets into an accident and it comes out in court that you had a zero-tolerance policy but didn’t let them go, the attorney is going to use that against you and claim you were negligent.”

Final Thoughts
Solopreneur or 100-year-old company, the onus is on your entire organization to be thinking proactively to mitigate risks to your team and clients alike.

“A heathy safety program is one that promotes constant collaboration and communication that is clearly fostered by leadership and transferred across company culture, which prioritizes the well-being of all employees,” says Shanker. “Companies that create a stellar safety platform tend to excel and promote a culture in which everyone employed holds the organization and each other to high standards, which encourages an environment for sustainability, growth, and morale, and leads to increased revenue generation and profitability.”

“Measuring ROI when it comes to your safety program can be tough, especially when it is doing its job and your accident and incident rate is very low. That is when I start hearing things like, ‘We aren’t having any issues, so we can scale things back.’ However, you have to think about it a different way. That is exactly like saying, ‘We are winning every game, so we don’t need to practice anymore.’ It is the complete opposite; you are winning every game BECAUSE you are practicing. Once you have a solid safety program, you have to be consistent,” says Blain.

“It really doesn’t take forever to create a safety department and change the direction of your company, but it truly is something that must be focused on from start to finish. A driver is not allowed to touch a commercial vehicle until the FMCSA’s Clearinghouse has been cleared. Without those documents, a fine for one driver is $5,500 when you could have hired a consultant for as little as $500 per month. You also don’t want to take weeks or months to implement because something else always gets in the way and eventually you realize that it’s on the back burner indefinitely,” says Holden.

“Once you have a safety program established and well documented, it needs to go into your insurance renewal presentation to show that you are proactive,” says Guinn. “Also, add it to your sales presentation. People like to feel warm and cozy when they’re booking transportation, right? That’s why we don’t just get into some random car at the airport; there are signs that warn against it. Make that part of your sales strategy and insurance renewal, and then watch the savings roll in.”   [CD0325]