November 7th, 2024 | Andrew Williams, Director of Client Solutions, Transportation
Morgan Miller, Enterprise Sales Executive, Transportation

Paving the Way to Hiring Efficiencies: Assess Driver Risk with Ongoing Monitoring

We hope you enjoyed our last blog in our series focusing on hiring and maintaining driver compliance. In our previous post, we covered the challenges employers face from having multiple, separate processes, and we also provided actionable takeaways revealing how organizations can integrate these into a single, cohesive workflow.

In this next edition, we’re uncovering how you can effectively manage your drivers and protect your driver workforce investments by using monitoring and training solutions.

Before we begin, we strongly recommend reviewing your current policies regarding driving. Ensure they’re not only current, but that they can also support any changes you wish to make. While Sterling can provide examples, we believe it’s important for you to work with the appropriate legal resources within your organization.

Driver Risk Management Provides a Learning Opportunity

“Drivers want to learn more. They want to work for companies that care about them, that are teaching them skills, coaching them, and making them better. If you train your drivers, you’re going to find it easier to retain your drivers.” — Rich Lacey — Head of Product, SambaSafety

Driver risk management shouldn’t be viewed as a way to remove risky drivers, but rather to proactively identify problematic behaviors early, so that they can be corrected with targeted feedback and training. Risk emerges when employers fail to address negative driver behavior early, including:

• Increase in claims severity (insurance claims are up 14% since 2020, and claims severity are up 36%¹)
• Loss in productivity or “Driver Downtime” (from 2021-2022 drivers aged 25-34 averaged 8 days away from work for non-fatal transportation incidents, accounting for 22% of all crashes ²)
• Brand Impact (crashes associated with brand names can negatively impact public perception, consumer loyalty, and purchasing decisions, ultimately impacting the company’s bottom line.)

For additional information on driver risks in 2024, click here.    

3 Key Data Points to Measure With Your Drivers      

Most organizations are collecting numerous data points related to their drivers’ performance and behavior, such as their MVR status. When considering the overall status of your drivers, we recommend collecting the following three data points:

• MVR Monitoring: MVR monitoring directly links with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMVs) in all 50 states, sending you daily updates when violations or changes in status occur for your drivers. It also fulfills your requirement of pulling annual MVRs for regulated drivers in 23 states.
• CSA Monitoring: While only applicable to CDL roles, this solution gives you daily updates of that population, including citations, roadside inspections, and DOT-reportable crashes, as opposed to manually pulling this data on an occasional basis.
• Telematics Monitoring: Companies should also continuously monitor drivers’ everyday behavior, including actions that might go unnoticed by law enforcement. By leveraging telematics solutions, companies can track driver activities like cell phone use, hard braking, smoking, and speeding, to gain a deeper understanding of potential risks. However, using multiple telematics devices or service providers can be challenging due to the sheer volume of data. To simplify this overload of information, telematics monitoring translates telematics data into clear notifications — providing better visibility and enabling quicker, targeted responses to high-risk behavior.

These three data sources are incredibly powerful individually, but the real value comes when combining them together to provide a risk score of your driver. A driver risk score is a measure of a driver’s safety performance that can help identify at-risk drivers and improve driving behaviors. Calculating a driver risk score can be the most accurate way to view the overall status of your driver and where you should focus your risk management activities.

Responding to Driver Risk with Actionable Training

“As part of our culture, we care deeply about our employees, our communities, and our customers. Some of the most significant impacts of MVR monitoring are improved insurance costs and the protection of our brand and reputation. It is not seen as a punitive program, but instead intended to identify any problems while they are still small enough to consider retraining, or other support we can provide to our valued employees.” — Equipment Rental Company

Not only is it critical to understand how your team performs behind the wheel, but how your organization responds to opportunities for improvement. While you can take many different actions, depending on your policies, you can’t afford to overlook training.     

Although general training is essential to encouraging safe behaviors, specific and early training (based on the data mentioned above) is essential to curbing dangerous behaviors early and increase the likelihood of safer driver behavior in the future. You can also factor in completed trainings into the above-mentioned risk score, giving you the most accurate and up-to-date information on the driver.    

Invest in Training for Operational Success

“We have seen impressive results when it comes to reducing violations. It’s been a great partnership with Sterling and has exceeded expectations, reducing our total violations by 37%.” — Food Distribution Company

Maintaining a safe work environment and a culture of safety involves many different tools and strategies. The above solutions can be an effective place to start, since they ensure you have impactful, accurate, and timely data on your driving population, as well as the ability to take targeted action to correct the behaviors. By utilizing these interconnected tools, we has seen on average a 77% reduction in monthly violations and a 9% reduction in claims for companies.

We look forward to releasing our next edition to our series on hiring and maintaining driver compliance. Next time we’ll shift gears and talk about processes supporting your non-regulated and non-driving roles and how they play a vital role in keeping your business safe and successful.

For questions on the above topic, or to connect with Sterling, reach out to us.

For more information on MVR monitoring, click here.

About SambaSafety: SambaSafety is a recognized innovator and leading provider of cloud-based risk management solutions for over 15,000 organizations with automotive mobility exposure, including many on Fortune’s Global 500 list. Employers and insurers benefit from SambaSafety’s continuous monitoring, intuitive insights, risk reduction tools, and configurable pricing solutions. Through the collection, correlation, and analysis of federal, state, local, and telematics data sources, our flexible, end-to-end capabilities enable businesses and insurers to better evaluate and mitigate driving risk, accelerate product development, reduce crashes, and foster safer communities.

To learn more about SambaSafety, visit www.sambasafety.com.

Sources

1 American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) 2023 Report: “Auto Insurance: The Uncertain Road Ahead”: https://www.apci.org/

2 National Safety Council Injury Facts, based on Days Away From Work (DAFW) Cases 2021-2022: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/work-injuries-and-illnesses-by-age/

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