April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Driving requires a motorist’s full attention at all times, as more than 90% of U.S. crashes involve human error. In 2020, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported 3,142 lives lost due to distracted driving.
Distracted driving is typically separated into four categories:
- Visual – anything that takes your eyes away from the road, such as billboards, street signs, your passengers or your cellphone.
- Auditory – noises that affect your ability to hear and take away your attention from the road, such as music or talking on the phone.
- Manual – removing your hand(s) from the wheel to accomplish other tasks, such as eating, texting or searching for items in the front or back seats.
- Cognitive – something that takes your focus off driving, such as a conversation, emotions or fatigue.
While distracted driving is an ever-growing problem, understanding the strategies to prevent it can save lives. Here are four ways companies can combat distracted driving.
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How Your Company Can Combat Distracted Driving
Stay Aware of All Company Driver Violations
How are you alerted about the driving violations your employees receive? Every mile that an individual drives without intervention puts your company and those on the road at greater risk. To implement a timely, proactive intervention strategy, you need to be alerted of distracted driving violations immediately after they happen. Continuous driver monitoring provides near real-time alerts when your drivers receive violations – whether those violations occur on or off the clock.
Assign Frequent Driver Training
Knowing about a violation isn’t the same as fixing it. Upon discovering a violation, you need a fast, simple and effective strategy in place that’s aimed at improving driver behavior. The shortest distance between knowing and fixing is assigning relevant driver training. There are three different types of training strategies you can implement at your company:
- Remedial training helps you take immediate action after someone receives a violation instead of ignoring the problem.
- Frequent training can be used to proactively prevent future violations and crashes.
- “Premedial” training, or remedial training assigned to new hires based on previous violations, can help expand your hiring pool.
Set Clear Driving Expectations in Your Safety Policy
Setting the standard for what safety looks like at your company is integral in helping your driver population understand that distracted driving is not tolerated. It’s important to create an organization-wide definition with examples to ensure that there’s no confusion amongst company drivers. Actions to be taken (such as training and intervention) are also appropriate to explicitly express within a safety policy.
Need to establish a stronger safety foundation for your drivers? We can help you implement a thorough driver safety policy.
Use a Comprehensive Risk Management Tool
You can save your company exponentially if you’re using the right tools to identify risky driving behaviors. Imagine a platform that allows you to identify distracted driving behavior, enroll distracted drivers in relevant training programs and track ongoing intervention efforts.
This is all made possible through comprehensive driver risk management software, like SambaSafety’s platform. Combining such technology with a solid safety policy is your best way to act against distracted driving and prevent future crashes, claims and lives lost.
Watch our free webinar, “How Your Company Can Combat Distracted Driving”, to learn how to create an effective intervention strategy. 