In most companies that run fleets, sooner or later someone suggests organising a safe driving course for employees. There are dozens of safe driving schools in Poland, so organising a course is not a problem in itself. Yet once the training is over, many fleet managers note with disappointment that it has not led to any drop in the claims rate; sometimes it even turns out that there are more collisions and accidents in the company after the training than before.
The question is whether this happens because safe driving courses are pointless in general, or for other reasons. Can such training be organised in a way that makes it effective? What should you look out for so that safe driving training results in a lower claims rate, and so that the effect lasts?
The answer is that safe driving training for drivers does make sense, but for it to work, several essential conditions have to be met. Looking at how different companies approach managing the claims rate in their fleets will help us understand what those conditions are.
1. Three types of companies that run vehicle fleets
Companies that run vehicle fleets can loosely be divided into three types:
- those that do nothing to make their fleets safer
- those that try, with mixed results
- those that have extensive fleet safety procedures and achieve very good results in this area.
Type one: the passive
The first type includes most Polish small and medium-sized businesses with fleets of a few to a dozen or so vehicles. These companies take no action on driving safety beyond what the law requires. They provide mandatory vehicle insurance, carry out roadworthiness tests and the other activities required by law, but do nothing more. This approach usually results in an above-average claims rate, above-average vehicle operating costs and above-average fuel consumption.
Type two: the beginners
The second type is far less numerous than the first. These are usually medium-sized businesses with fleets of several dozen vehicles that try to act on fleet safety but are only at the start of the process. The activities they undertake are usually small in scale and often not very effective. The fleet manager in such a company often has to contend with many obstacles: a small budget for reducing the claims rate, a lack of clear backing from the board (which treats fleet safety activities as a cost), and sometimes also their own lack of experience. As a result, the claims rate and fuel consumption in such companies do not differ significantly from type-one companies, i.e. they also leave much to be desired.
Such companies usually use only two measures to improve fleet safety. The first is a set of rules for using company vehicles (a fleet policy), usually very vague when it comes to driving safety guidelines. The second is safe driving training, usually run only occasionally, and if so, in the form of a skid-pan course that is also meant to double as a team-building event. It is precisely in companies of this type that the problem of ineffective training mentioned at the outset most often arises.
Type three: the safety leaders
And finally the third type, very different from the first two. These are businesses that apply a wide range of measures to ensure fleet safety and place great emphasis on the subject every day. It is in such companies that the highest fleet safety indicators are most often achieved.
In Poland, this third category of companies mostly consists of branches or subsidiaries of large international corporations. The number of such entities in the country can be estimated at a few hundred. These companies manage to achieve high fleet safety indicators because they draw on their international experience in managing the claims rate. The fleet safety practices they apply are a kind of collective knowledge accumulated in the corporate world over the last few decades.
According to that knowledge, the question posed in the title of this article can be answered in two ways: first, safe driving training alone is not enough, and second, it has to be run in a very specific way. Driver training is indeed used by the safety-leader companies, but its programme often differs markedly from the standard on the Polish market. In addition, in these companies training is only one of many activities used to manage the claims rate.
So if a company wants to look after the level of safety in its fleet, including investing wisely in driver training, the best course is to copy the solutions used by the safety-leader companies. That way we will not have to reinvent the wheel on our own. Instead, we can draw on ready-made practices that have been refined over several decades and are known to work. Below we present the most important of these practices.
2. Safe driving training in a company: best practices
In Poland, when we think about improving safety in a company fleet, we often think only of training. Yet the experience of the companies with the best fleet safety results shows that yes, training matters, but it is only one piece of a larger puzzle aimed at reducing the claims rate. In other words, a high level of fleet safety should be built not only on training but on many actions that need to be invested in at the same time.
Yes, drivers should be sent on safe driving courses
Practically all companies that achieve high safety indicators in their fleets train their employees in safe driving. A presentation of best practices in safe driving courses can therefore begin with the statement that drivers of company cars should be trained, and that when delivered properly, such training proves effective.
...but training should not be a single, isolated action
Training should not, however, be used as the only action we take, in the hope that it will be enough to achieve the goal. Safe driving courses should be one element of a programme covering a varied range of educational, administrative and management actions aimed at improving fleet safety.
Why is training alone, even the best, not enough? First, even if we invest in good training, its message will not reach everyone. In every fleet there is a group of individuals resistant to education or persuasion, and for them we need alternative tools of influence.
Second, road safety is a complex matter. Accidents often happen not through any lack of driver skill at all, or that is only one of the causes. A collision may also result from factors such as the employee's personality traits, a sub-optimal choice of route, the poor technical condition of the vehicle, stress arising from the pressure of the employer's demands and many other matters. What is needed, then, is a whole set of actions that reduce all the possible causes of accidents, not just those related to drivers' skills. Examples of such actions include:
- Implementing in the company a set of rules governing the use of vehicles from a safety perspective, i.e. a Fleet Safety Policy.
- Active support from the board and management for the idea of safe driving.
- Appointing a person or group of people responsible for fleet safety.
- Building an organisational culture in the company that is conducive to safety.
- Using telematics solutions to monitor drivers' driving style and motivate them to behave correctly behind the wheel.
- Collecting and analysing data on the claims rate, accidents, fuel consumption and driver behaviour in order to identify trends and risk areas.
- Investing in vehicles with a high level of active and passive safety.
When you say "training", think "education"
When thinking about "driver training", we should understand the term as broadly as possible, i.e. as all possible forms of driver education. There are many educational activities for fleet drivers available on the market. Apart from the most popular, i.e. courses run at advanced driving centres using skid pans, you can also use services such as:
- theoretical and practical defensive driving courses, run in ordinary road traffic
- theoretical and practical eco-driving courses
- lectures, workshops and webinars on safe driving
- written materials: newsletters, handbooks, guides, e-learning
- educational messages sent via a telematics application that scores drivers' driving style, if the company uses one.
A safe driving course must have specific goals
Experience also shows that safe driving training only has a chance of working when its goal is not so much to improve drivers' skills as to change their everyday behaviour in traffic. This seems a merely semantic difference, but it is not. Accidents are usually not the result of a lack of skill at all; most often they are the consequence of repeatedly risky behaviour that a driver may get away with for years until it finally ends badly. Such undesirable behaviour includes, for example, breaking traffic rules, driving too close to the vehicle in front or making sudden manoeuvres on the road.
To be able to approach driver education in this way, we first need to know what undesirable behaviour our drivers display on the road. We can of course try to guess, because the sins of those behind the wheel tend to be similar. But if we want to plan our actions precisely, practically the only way is to install a telematics solution with a driving style analysis function in the vehicles. Only that will let us find out exactly what our employees do on the road every day.
Next, we should design our drivers' education so that its goal is to change the specific behaviours we have detected in them and want to eliminate. Ask the safe driving academy we work with to design a programme that will bring about the change in behaviour we need.
Not all training is equal
The goal of training should therefore not be the commonly encountered generalities such as "raising driver awareness" or "improving driving technique". Training should have specific goals related to changing our employees' behaviour behind the wheel of a company car, and deliver those goals effectively. Contrary to appearances, this is no easy task and requires high qualifications both from the school organising the course and from the trainers running it. That is precisely why a large proportion of safe driving training proves ineffective.
What is more, some of the courses available on the market can actually cause the claims rate to rise, as many fleet managers have learned the hard way. When does this risk arise? Above all, steer clear of any training that trades on associations with motorsport, focuses on fun or on "skid recovery techniques". These can give participants a sense of over-confidence and encourage them to drive more riskily.
Nor is the view popular in Poland that a skid-pan course is always the best option true. This belief rests on the false assumption that most road incidents result from skidding. In reality the vast majority of accidents and collisions (around 70-80% according to Polish road safety statistics) involve failure to give way, failure to keep a safe distance, collisions with pedestrians, breaches of the rules and similarly mundane matters. That is why it is worth looking at training that focuses on precisely these issues: above all the defensive driving courses already mentioned above.
Better often and cheap than expensive and once in a blue moon
Experience also shows that the effects of training, even the best, have a limited lifespan: for the average driver the effect starts to fade after just a few months. In addition, most companies have ongoing staff turnover, which at the level of the whole fleet also gradually dilutes the effects of educational activities. That is why small but frequent training sessions are better than organising even a very extensive safe driving course, but only once every few years.
This is also another argument for reaching beyond skid-pan training to alternative educational activities: they often simply turn out to be significantly cheaper and easier to organise as often as needed.
3. Safe driving courses and the claims rate: summary
The experience of companies with the lowest accident rates in their car fleets confirms that it is worth running safe driving training for users of company vehicles. But such training only has a chance of bringing positive results if it is properly planned and delivered.
For training to be effective, above all it must not be the only measure we use. It should be just one of a wide range of actions aimed at reducing the claims rate: not only educational, but also administrative and managerial. The company's whole organisational culture and operating principles should be conducive to safe driving, and training should be only one of the activities we undertake.
Furthermore, when thinking about training, think broadly. One type of training is unlikely to prove sufficient. In particular, do not limit yourself to skid-pan courses. There is a wide choice of other forms of driver education on the market, which will often work better than a skid pan as a solution to the problems identified in our fleet. In addition, these alternative forms may turn out to be cheaper.
Also aim to keep your employees in constant contact with the subject of safe driving. So it is worth opting for frequent educational activities, even if they are small. With a limited budget this will be a better solution than a comprehensive training programme organised with gaps of many years.
