How to develop a world-class safety program

0:00 | Dan Smith

So today we want to talk about how to build a world-class safety program. And again, to get this accomplished, it’s more than a one-hour project, but we’re going to try to highlight some things for your consideration when you’re setting up your safety program that will help you get to a world-class safety program. 

Today. I got one of my colleagues here, mary shepherd. She’s one of the safety gurus at Motive. My name is Dan Smith. Been here just actually for the last year. Was a user of Motive prior to that, KeepTruckin for a long time, many years. Came to work for him this year. Been in the transportation industry for over 30 years and have done a lot of building safety programs and making them bigger, better, faster, stronger. So today we’d like to share some of that and I’ll let Mary introduce herself.

1:10 | Mary Shepherd

Yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Mary Shepherd. I’ve been at Motive for three and a half years now, and I’m on the product team here. So I work with our engineering team, designers, data scientists, and whatnot in building some of these products to help you guys manage your safety programs and compliance programs in the most efficient and effective way possible.

1:37 | Dan Smith

Thank you, Mary. All right, we’re going to jump on in. Our agenda, we’re going to cover safety and your culture safety management cycle, hiring and retaining the right people, embracing technology to manage your compliance, CSA, and driver safety program, and just give you a quick summary at the end. 

If you have questions, feel free to send them to us. In the dashboard, there’s a question location and we’ll answer everybody’s question. When you get this video back sent to you, it’ll have answers and all the questions and answers listed on it. So don’t feel the need to take a ton of notes because you’re going to get this. So I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve given a lot of presentations to board of directors, to drivers, to companies. For 30 years I’ve been talking about safety and working in the safety world. 

And it’s always been interesting to me the fact that there’s not a lot of definitions out there on what safety is. And everybody gets nervous when they start looking at DOT regulations. They see all this big ball of terrifying stuff that you have to cover for a safety program. And this definition that you’re looking at right now is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever seen to explain safety. What is it? It’s the identification of hazards as they pertain to a particular occupation. 

So a fireman will have different hazards than a plumber, a plumber has different hazards than a truck driver. And it’s really about managing those hazards. Whatever occupation you’re in, what you do is you identify the problems and then you eliminate the hazard or you reduce it to an acceptable level. And this is universal. You can use this definition for any safety program anywhere, whether it’s loss prevention or compliance. 

This is what you’re doing and you’ve been doing it with your kids. You’ve been doing it at work. You do it in your garage. You do it everywhere not even realizing that you’re defined safety and now you’re living safety. So let me give you an example. The easiest one I can think of is the weather. So can you eliminate the hazard? No, we can’t control the weather. God does that for us. 

Best we could do is pull our drivers off the road to eliminate the hazard. No matter what fleet you’re driving, whether it’s F 150 or 26,000-pound tractor trailers or bigger, the only way to eliminate the hazard, in that case, would be to park your vehicles. But that’s not always necessary. You can drive and inclement weather and you can reduce the hazard, and the weather to an acceptable level by adjusting your driving habits. You can slow down. You can give yourself more time, more following distance. 

You can prepare by taking different routes. If you know you’re going to be in some areas that are heavy snow or ice, stay off those roads, take a different route that’s better maintained. So again, that’s safety. You identified a hazard. You can’t eliminate the hazard, but you can reduce it to an acceptable level so that when you apply anything you’re doing in the safety world, it’s going to fall under this whether it’s compliance or loss prevention. 

So one of the biggest things that you can do is connect safety with your culture, okay? And the culture is the assumption of beliefs that a worker has about the company and that drives their behavior. So here’s a corny way to look at it. Take a fish. A fish is in water and the water is the culture. They don’t see water. A fish doesn’t see water. He doesn’t see anything. But it is what it is and he’s in it. And if it’s good water, you have a healthy fish. If it’s bad water, you have an unhealthy fish. 

Culture is the same way. You don’t see it. It’s not necessarily a sign on the wall, but it’s how people behave based on what the culture of your company is. And those assumptions drive their behavior, which ultimately drive your results. So if you’ve got a company that’s all about on-time delivery and nothing else matters and that’s what is displayed every day or it’s demonstrated every day. 

Look, I don’t care what happens, you get the load there, or look these customers need picked up. Hurry up, do what you got to do. Those kinds of cultural things happen every day. And that’s part of the culture that you want to change to get into a safety culture so that the assumptions made by your employees lead to the behavior that you’re looking for that will drive your safety result. And every company has a culture whether they know it or not. And you can probably figure out that culture in about an hour if you’re in the operations room. 

So some of the things that you can do to connect safety to your culture is to have a safety leader. There should be somebody who is the head of or the driver of the safety bus. Okay? Ensure upper management participates in safety meetings. If your culture is that the safety is done from the middle management down and they have meetings down and lower levels or dispatchers or entry-level positions. And if that’s where the safety is pushed from, your culture isn’t going to thrive the way you want. 

You’re not going to have that healthy water. Get your upper management involved and participate in that because that’s the support that will help you get the culture where you want it to be. Follow consistent safety-based driver hiring criteria. Many of you have probably heard this over and over and over. You hire your problems and that’s 100% true, whether it’s your driver force or your office force. So again, be picky. Use job descriptions with safety contracts and enforce them. 

You bring a person in to work as an employee, driver, or whatnot. Give them some roles and responsibilities in their job description. Make them part of the solution that you’re looking for to drive your safety program. Get them involved. Make it part of their job description so that it carries the weight that you’re looking for. Have regular communications about safety. 

If safety is something that gets brought up once a month, and then at the end of the month you bring it up again, and then the next month you bring it up again, it’s clearly not going to be the culture you want. You want safety to be in everyday life, at a company, at every level, in every department because everybody has a play in that. Go ahead, Mary.

9:10 | Mary Shepherd

Yeah, I’ll take the last few here. So the next one is incent and reward safety performance. So most of you have probably heard of this before or even thought about it, but building out incentive programs is a really good way to keep drivers engaged and keep safety top of mind. Whether it’s monthly goals, quarterly goals, or yearly bonuses that maybe drivers can earn. 

This way they’re always working towards the goal and that goal has safety in mind. Next, we talk about investing in technology to help drivers and others perform safely. This probably isn’t a new concept to most of you, but I think what’s important here is that technology doesn’t have to be a scary thing. And I think what people are starting to realize is that as your fleet grows in size, you’re not going to be able to get to every single driver and every single corrective action that they might need to take. 

And that’s where technology can come in and play a hand for you. And what really is helpful here is utilizing technology to kind of be an extended arm of your safety and compliance program. So with things like cameras and whatnot, you might not be able to get to the driver or ride along with every single driver and every single trip, but that camera can, and that camera can provide that real-time feedback to the driver for you. 

In this sense, the technology acts as an extended arm to your culture, but at the same time, it’s also giving drivers that real-time feedback and that real-time visibility so they’re not having to go back and ask you how they’re doing. The technology is giving them that visibility and that transparency without having to contact you. 

And then lastly, once you have set up your leader, you’ve developed policies and procedures, all that fun stuff, you want to be able and you’ve developed your incentive program. You’ve got to be able to utilize data to be able to understand if you’re successful in staying true to your policies, but also reaching your goals. And so this is where if you’re running an incentive program, you want to be able to have the reports in place to understand based off the goals that you’ve set. Are certain drivers hitting these goals so then you can reward them in whatever way? All right, Dan, I’ll hand it back to you.

11:52 | Dan Smith

All right, hopefully, I’ll change the slide. There we go. Okay, so we want to cover the safety management cycle. Again, if you have questions, feel free to send them in whenever you have them. At the end of this, we’ll try to get to them all. If we don’t, you’ll get answers when the email comes out. 

So the safety management cycle, most people have seen this before. In some variation, it’s out there. As a matter of fact, you’re going to see a different variation of it later in this presentation. So, policies and procedures, remember the definition of safety. So you’re going to identify your hazards and you’re going to try to eliminate them or reduce them. And that’s where your policies and procedures come in. 

You’re going to attempt to implement your safety programs with that in mind. So whenever you have a policy or a procedure that you’re putting together, that’s your driving force. What is the issue and what is the fix? And that should be in writing roles and responsibilities. Again, get everyone involved. The more the better. More people have the ability to interact with drivers nowadays. 

Everybody has communications in the truck. You have cell phones and text messages. Everybody’s involved in communicating with the driver nowadays, no matter what vehicle the driver’s driving. And they have the ability to influence a lot of different things, but mainly attitude. We don’t want to have a payroll system or a payroll department that’s not involved in the safety program. And they’re making all the drivers anxious or nervous, mad, whatever, and it’s showing up in their driver performance. 

So, again, get everybody involved and give them roles and responsibilities. Get everybody talking, get everybody on the same page with your program qualifications and hiring. We’re going to cover this in a lot more detail, but you hire your problems. So the goal here is to come up with your set of standards that you use, and you write those standards so that your recruiting staff knows who they’re looking for, what they’re looking for from a driver standpoint. 

And again, you hire your problems. So the goal is to hire the best drivers that you can with your minimum set of standards, training, and communication. Again, get everybody involved in this, communicate. Often. It’s part of getting everyone involved. Has to be visibility into the program. It has to be from the front end on. You want to get these guys engaged in every aspect of the safety program. They should have a seat at the table to talk about because they can influence the driver and his safety numbers. Go ahead, Mary. I think I lost. Mary, I’m here.

14:58 | Mary Shepherd

Yeah. So I think to kind of round this out, once you work on developing your safety policy for your fleet, it’s all about kind of managing the drivers to that policy, documenting your interactions, and tracking your progress. And so all of this kind of makes up your safety program. And I think we’ll go through each of these steps in detail right now. So I’ll hand it back over to Dan there.

15:28 | Dan Smith

All right, so some of the policies and procedures, some things to consider. So everybody has a different philosophy, or they can have their own philosophy on what to put in writing and how to put it in writing. And there’s more than one way to do everything we’re going to talk about here. There’s no set do this. That’s not the way it works. And you guys all have everybody on this call has different things that are working for them and are searching for other things. 

That’s the nature of safety, and that’s okay. Make sure your policies and procedures address both behaviors and skills. One of the things that I’ve seen over the last 30 years, and many of you may have seen it too, is people try to educate behaviors away. Well, sign him a class. He’s following distance is too close, or he’s speeding all the time. Assigning a class. Keep in mind, some things are strictly behaviors and some things could be skills, but your policy should reflect both. 

There’s not a class that I’m aware of that can teach a driver how to obey the speed limit. That’s a behavior, and it should be treated as such. So when you’re putting your policies together, think of both behaviors and skills. Set your expectations. I ask this in orientation classes all the time. Is it reasonable for a company to hire an employee or to sign on a contractor and have the expectations of zero accidents, zero violations, zero citations, zero injuries, zero cargo claims? Is that reasonable? I’ve never had anybody tell me that that was unreasonable. 

But you need to set that expectation, and you need to have that expectation reflected in your hiring criteria, your contractor criteria, and your recruiters, all the way up through the process. Everybody needs to understand our goal here. Our expectation is zero. We don’t do bad things here. And set that expectation and reiterate it. Make sure they get it. From your policy standpoint, again, use your three E’s, and a lot of you have probably heard of this before. 

Engineer your hazards away. If you can throw another hand, hold onto a truck, or use a four-wheel drive vehicle instead of a two-wheel drive vehicle, and you’re specking out your equipment, add a set of stairs here or there. Anything you can do to engineer your hazards away should be your first option. It’s not always going to work. It doesn’t work for everything. But if you can, that’s where I would start. 

Educate everyone on your policies and procedures. You can expect to get the results. If you don’t have everybody understand the policies, procedures, and make sure they know how to follow them. If you don’t teach them, who’s going to? So again, don’t leave anybody out and include those other departments. You’ve got a lot of different departments touch drivers. Whether they’re, again, commercial drivers or non-commercial drivers, there’s a lot of people that can address those. Address the drivers and create problems. 

Once you set your policies and procedures up, enforce them. If you have policies and you go have your drivers sign off on them and say, yes, I understand them, but don’t enforce them, you’re the problem. If you’re going to have a policy or procedure, then make sure it’s followed, because you wrote that for a reason. And you need people to understand this is what your expectation is because it’s going to drive the results that you’re looking for. So again, enforce them. 

If you have policies on the books that you have no intentions of enforcing or procedures, get them out of there, update them, or remove them, because those are the things that are going to be used against you in a court case if it ever has. If it ever happens. Excuse me. So your policy should outline the goal of the policy. Why am I doing this? Why am I having this process in place? Your expected procedure or behavior, what is the goal of this? And a penalty for non-compliance, some sort of progressive discipline. 

Keep it simple. I talk to carriers all the time that pull out a book that’s got 70 pages, 100 pages in it, and it’s all their policies and procedures. And they’re all written very well, and they probably spent a lot of money doing it. But they don’t follow them, or they can’t follow them because they’re so specific, so big, that they’ve now created a monster that can’t be complied with. Keep it simple. If you have a policy, it doesn’t have to be pages long, it can be very short and sweet and then forcible and manageable. 

So again, if you’re going to put it in writing, do it. If you’re going to put it in writing, make it understandable, make it easily followed, and make it so that as a company you can show that you wrote the policy, you trained the policy and you enforced the policy. Those are big steps in your program and you should follow those. So who’s your audience for your policies and procedures? So, you’ve got DOT-regulated drivers, you have non-DOT regulated, and you have owner-operators and company drivers. 

I hear a lot of questions on owner-operators or lease purchase drivers and how you can enforce policies on them. If you have a dot driver who’s regulated by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration or regulations. If you have a DOT driver in 390.5 definition of an employee, they include an owner-operator in there. So not only do you have a right to manage the safety of a contract or lease purchase, whatever you have an obligation to if they’re running under your authority, from a DOT standpoint, you don’t get to ignore them simply because they’re owner-operators. You have to manage them. 

Now, does it look exactly like a company driver? No, it doesn’t. But you can have the standards that you want, the expectations that you want, and you can manage those owner operators and everybody typically has some sort of human resource or compliance group that can help you set that up so you don’t get yourself in trouble. Non-DOT drivers, look, you have policies, you have company policies, you have MBRs, you have telematics and cameras. These are the people that are working for you whether they’re under a DOT authority or not, or non-DOT regulated. 

All of us have rules that we need to follow and there’s nothing wrong with you enforcing your policies. And you can do it without being mean, condescending, nasty. We hear all kinds of things, you all have too, but you can do it for everybody. So owner-operator and company employees both need to be managed if they’re running under your authority, running under your policies, your procedures. 

So again, all of your audiences is everybody that’s working for you on these policies and procedures and they need to be trained. Like we stated before, hiring and retaining the right people. So starting with the right people is huge. If you’ve got the wrong people in the office and or behind the wheel, you’re going to struggle to hit the goals that you’re looking for. So there’s a lot of attention paid on who you bring in and put behind the wheel of a vehicle. 

The National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence recently issued a research report on pre-employment driver screening and best practices. And it’s probably not a surprise to anybody on this call that ten to 15% are over-involved in crashes and violations. I would say just about everybody would say the 1080 ten rule or the 80/20 rule. 

Look, a very small percentage of people cause a large percentage of your problems, whether that’s 10%, 20%, whatever. So for them to say ten to 15% over-involvement, crashes, and violations doesn’t surprise me a bit. And I doubt that it would surprise a bunch of you. During the study though, they came up with a group of six things that most companies felt were effective ways of qualifying drivers. And this is not just the owner, I’m sorry, this is not just DOT regulated. 

This can be applied to everybody that you’re hiring, whether they’re a company or an owner-operator. So here’s the six most effective screening practices, performance, or skills testing. So some of these are specific to DOT that were used for the answers in their testing or in the survey. So you’re going to see a lot of DOT things. But if you’ve got a fleet of non-DOT-regulated people, this all works for them too. So don’t discount it because the DOT people are the ones that were responding to the survey. 

The number one most effective qualification was a road test, a real driving test. And you can do this with any type of vehicle. You should have somebody who is experienced and well-trained in defensive driving. Maybe the Smith system, maybe the National Safety Council courses. Whatever. But the number one test was to take a driver out on the road. And I would suggest when you do that, you make them do different scenarios. 

Get on and off of a highway or an interstate, make a right turn, left turn, find railroad tracks to go over, give them real-life situations in a road test … and that will tell you a lot. Just get a person talking while they’re driving and pretty soon they just start driving just like themselves. And this is what you’re going to get when he or she is alone in that vehicle. And again, it doesn’t matter what type of vehicle. 

The second one was background checks. And again, this is getting a little bit more regulated as time goes on, specifically with criminal background checks. So you need to check your local municipality or your state regulations or laws on what you can run. But these are just things that you can look into to get a good background on the driver. 

You want to know what prior crashes, and moving violations they have. You want to know criminal background if you’re legally able to get that information. You want to get their Social Security … check to make sure they’re legal to work in the country, education verification. If people are telling you something, they should be able to prove it. If they said they’re a college graduate, okay, show me credit history. 

Again, if you’re into lease, purchaser, or owner-operators, that may matter to you. There’s a lot of legal issues with that also, so you need to be careful. Military Discharge Records if a person is dishonorably discharged from the military, there may be issues that you need to address before that person gets behind the wheel. They’re MVR. In the past, research the driver’s license check to verify drivers. Motor vehicle report is one of the most effective ways to identify a safe driver. 

In the current study, motor vehicle reports reviewed as the second most effective pre-employment screening technique. Things haven’t changed. And now if you’re a commercial driver, you have a PSP that you can order. So there’s a lot of information out there for DOT and non-DOT-regulated drivers that matter. And I would suggest using those before you put somebody behind a wheel. 

Drug Screening so past research, the link between drug testing for pre-employment screening and low crash rate was unsupported. Random drug tests have been found to reduce crash rates. The new study shows respondents reviewed pre-employment drug testing is the third most effective pre-employment screening technique. And there’s a lot of companies out there right now that are doing non-DOT tests using hair testing, which gives you up to a 90-day look at drug use. 

DOT hasn’t necessarily backed all of that for all the tests yet, but I think it’s going to happen at some point. But let me show you something that should scare you. And these numbers are not as up to date, so I think they’re last years, there were three and a half million people, commercial truck drivers in the clearinghouse. Of those, 156,000 of them failed or refused to test. And that was for all kinds of different drugs. 

If you’re a DOT-regulated company, you know that if a person has a positive test, they have to go through a program to get allowed to drive. Again, 73% of the people, 73% of those 156 have never been cleared to drive. But I guarantee you some of them are driving right now because companies have poor drug testing programs. And I don’t know what the percentage is, nobody does. But there’s issues out there with this check for drugs. 

There’s no positive impact that a driver with drugs in a system can make. He’s not worth it. She’s not worth the risk that they pose when this goes to some sort of litigation and they find out the person had a previous drug or alcohol violation and that they didn’t go through the SAP program. So, very scary. 

Personality tests… so there’s always been debates or studies done on a person’s personality versus their increased or decreased risk. And this year, same thing in the study. The same results are out there. People are using personality tests and face-to-face discussions to qualify a person. And again, there’s some legal issues on this also that you may want to consider. But these tests are fairly accurate if you’re in the mode of trying to qualify the best drivers with the best personalities. 

You may find drivers that have a great personality profile, yet they have a lot of accidents or negative issues, violation citations, or vice versa. So it’s not 100%. But right now 79% performed face-to-face interviews with prospective employees or drivers and they’re using personality tests. So again, some legal issues you need to be concerned about that. Again, talk to your company attorneys about. But I’ve seen this work in the past. I’ve used it for training purposes for driver trainers to make sure I have the right personalities out there. Using it for hiring purposes is a little tougher to do, but it is an option. 

All else fails, make sure you’re talking to the drivers or the potential drivers, face-to-face medical examinations. Again, there’s certain medical conditions in the DOT world that say you cannot drive. Most of them can be overcome, but there are some things that will make it so a driver can’t operate. Most companies have a qualification process in place where they either accept a medical certificate from a previous employer, but they have to get that long form so that they can verify that it’s accurate. Never separate the two. 

If you’re going to accept a previous employee’s medical card, then you need to have the corresponding long form with it. This is something the rule says that the motor carrier is responsible to make sure that the driver is medically qualified. So without that long form, I don’t know how you would do that. So put the two together. It’s important. The people that responded to this survey said it was important. I personally have seen drivers come in with issues. You find if you start looking at medical certificates versus long forms, you’re going to find people that are falsifying forms. It’s a big deal. They need to be medically qualified and it needs to be recent. 

So remember, the longest physical out there from a DOT standpoint is only two years. So a lot can change in two years physically. So consider what your standards are going to be. Are you going to accept anybody that’s less than six months old or twelve months? Whatever? Just know the medical examination is extremely important. 

Everybody’s using it in the DOT world may have some legal issues on the non-DOT side, but again, talk to your HR, your upper management, and figure out how this fits into your non-DOT regulated driver’s role. And then number six was a physical ability test. Again, I’ve used this in the past and we saved a lot of money on injuries. This is not necessarily a safety driver issue, it’s more of a work comp or driver injury issue. And this is very regulated as well. 

This testing has to be done correctly or you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. You need to have a lot of research done by medical personnel. And what the actual job descriptions are. They put together a test that will mimic what is required of the person based on their job description. And you test if they fail to meet those requirements, you don’t bring them on board and you should be able to reduce your injury claims. If they can’t perform the functions that are required, the question would be, why would you bring them in? 

This again is not cheap, but I’ve always found it very effective and the people in the survey found that this was an effective way to do it as well. So again, just a quick summary of this performance and skills testing. Test them on the roads that they’re going to be driving on, in the vehicles they’re going to be driving on. Background checks, MVRs, past employment, whatever you can get, check them. Drug screening, again, pre-employment, very important. All reasonable, random, all of those are very important. There’s a big enough failure rate out there that you should be concerned and take that very seriously. 

Personality testing may or may not be useful to you. There is a correlation between personality and future accidents, but there’s a cost to it. And there’s some legal issues there too. Medical exam, DOT, medical certificate. Make sure you have rules on what you’re going to accept or not accept when you’re going to make them. Go get a new one. Have all of that in writing, in your processes, procedures, and policies. And then finally, physical ability testing. Again, a lot of legal issues on this. You got to make sure you do it right. But I have found it extremely valuable in reducing injury claims. Mary, you want to take the retaining point?

37:21 | Mary Shepherd

Yeah. Cool. So once you’ve found the right people, you want to make sure you can keep them. So there’s really three main things to think about here. The first one is transparency. So we want to make sure that drivers don’t feel like anything’s ever hidden from them. And our kind of belief here is drivers should have the same visibility into their data as the back office does. A lot of these sleep management companies. 

There’s also a Driver App and this is where drivers are able to view all of the same data that the back office can view on them. And we just believe that this helps provide a better driver-to-back office relationship. And again, the drivers don’t ever feel like anything’s hidden from them. Secondly, continuous training. Just make sure drivers know that you value them, you value what they do for your company and for you. 

And so I think something that we hear a lot from fleets is continuing to invest in drivers’ own professional development has been really helpful. And then lastly, we talked about this a little bit earlier about rewarding safe and consistent performance. This is a way to keep drivers motivated and it’s a way for you to show your appreciation. 

All right, so you’ve hired the right people, you developed your policies, you have buy-in from your team. Now what? And this is where it all comes down to utilizing technology to help you manage drivers to your policies, track progress towards your company and track progress towards your company’s safety goals.

39:06 | Dan Smith

Sorry about that. I turned myself off for no reason. Now that we’re going to move into some of the technologies and things. But why does compliance matter? The ATRI, which is the American Transportation Research Institute, which is part of the American Trucking Association, does a study and they’ve done it three times I think in the last 22 years and they just updated the Predicting Truck Crash involvement study in 2022. 

And from a compliance standpoint, here was a summary of the crash likelihood based on some of the violations that they’ve had. And if you look at these, there’s some pretty scary things on there. A reckless driving violation makes a person 114 times more likely to crash, failure to yield, failure to keep an improper lane. 

There’s a big increase in likelihood of crashes based on some of the performance of it that you may or may not have seen which you want to see in the driver’s performance. And if you look at some things that technology really identifies following too close 47% more likely to crash, speeding violations 40-something-times more likely to crash, improper passing, seatbelt violations. All of these violations are predictors of future accidents. And all of the data in here comes from roadside inspections, or citations and it clarifies those in each of the line items. 

But they’re driver behaviors, driver skills that are leading to future accidents or increased likelihood. The job of safety is to say, you know what, this is identified as a risk. These people are a risk. So now I have to eliminate the risk or I have to reduce that risk to an acceptable level. And this is where your coaching and maybe your ride alongs or your educational program will change some of the behaviors that are being reflected in these violations and citations. 

So compliance isn’t just about not getting a ticket. It’s about behaviors that lead to future crashes. And these are things that tell you the person’s crash is coming. You need to intervene and change something with that driver through your safety processes, policies and procedures so that you can eliminate that future crash that they’re more likely to get into.

41:57 | Mary Shepherd

Cool. So I’ll walk through the technology that Motive provides kind of helps manage, you can utilize the technology to help manage your programs and whatnot. But the first thing first, technology doesn’t have to be scary when it’s implemented correctly and it’s backed by a strong safety program. 

Fleets quickly realize the benefits both in terms of just being able to operate more efficiently but also being more effective at actually lowering your exposure and your liability on the road. And we’ll showcase some data that we’ve seen from our fleets and how they’ve been able to achieve those results. So we’ll walk through how technology can help both in terms of giving you visibility and unsafe behavior on the road, but also manage your data efficiently so that you can take actions to prevent those accidents. 

So two main types of technology that will talk about there’s technology that resides on the vehicle, so that’s usually your hardware, like your vehicle gateways, ELDs cameras, et cetera. And then there’s also the back sorry, excuse me, the back office technology, which is basically compiling all the data that you’re getting from the vehicles and basically synthesizing it and presenting it into actionable workflows for you to go ahead and take that action. All right, so let’s dive in. 

So safety really starts with compliance and following the laws of the road, as Dan mentioned. And so with a company like Motive, you can get a 360 view into your compliance health all in one place. And this includes CSA monitoring. And so kind of the benefit of this, what we call back office technology, is that you’re going to get some efficiency gains through things like automated workflows to quickly address routine like day-to-day tasks. If we look at one example, if you go to the next slide. 

So one of the biggest time sucks for fleets today that we see fleets come across is having to assign and reassign trips. And so with a technology provider like Motive who basically has built this technology to kind of help automate this task for fleets by looking at things like facial recognition, utilizing vehicle location data, et cetera, to basically automatically kind of take care of this task for you as a fleet. 

So we can utilize the data that we collect from the vehicle, including location data, last known driver in the vehicle, and also any images that we might get from the camera to go ahead and suggest, hey, this trip is unassigned. We think this driver is probably the one who is doing it. And this way, Motive kind of like takes care of this task for you, ultimately saving you time to focus on other important tasks that need action. So these are just some examples of where technology plays a role on more like compliance-related tasks. 

But now let’s take a look at where technology can play a role in your driver safety program. Just go to the next slide. All right. Investing in cameras is critical and crucial for any successful driver safety program. The reason I say this is because if you don’t know what’s happening on the road, how are you going to reduce your liability and your exposure if you don’t have a camera? You don’t know what’s happening on the road unless you can participate in a ride along with every single driver and every single trip. 

Again, cameras are going to allow you to be proactive in addressing that liability and exposure and not wait for a driver to get pulled over, get a ticket, failed inspection, et cetera. A lot of what you saw in the Atri report is a result of drivers actually getting caught, right? And what the camera allows you to do is not have to wait for a driver to get caught. You get visibility into behaviors and actions that are happening on the road even before a ticket happens, right? 

And so the benefit here is this allows you to be proactive in addressing these behaviors before it results in an accident. As you saw with the Atri report, most of those top crash predictors are all behaviors that you’re going to get from the camera itself. So the camera is going to give you the visibility into the top predictors of a crash that you need. And so safety actually doesn’t stop with just the camera, right? You install the camera, but then you’ve got to be able to manage everything that the camera is telling you. And so this is where the safety cycle comes in. 

The camera is just the first step. Once you’ve installed them and you’ve worked with your executive team on developing your safety policy for your fleet, it’s all about managing drivers to that policy, documenting your interactions, and then being able to track your progress toward hitting the goals that you’ve set forth for yourself. And all of this makes up your safety program. So if we are to dive into each of these points, we’ll do that next. 

So AI Dashcams are going to give you — sorry, one second, my screen just went blank — Okay. AI Dashcams are going to give you, like I said, the visibility that you need to reduce reliability and exposure on the road. But they go beyond just providing visibility. These dash cams can actually provide real-time coaching and reinforcement to the drivers for you. So, if you remember I mentioned earlier, it’s not just about installing the camera. And the camera gives you this visibility and building a safety program or having a safety leader. 

The benefit of technology is that the camera can actually become an extended arm of your safety department for you because you’re not going to be able to talk to every single driver and every unsafe behavioral occurrence, but the camera can. Right? And that’s the real value of this investment, is that the camera is able to identify the risk and provide that feedback in real time to the driver in the cab in an effort to prevent that behavior from continuing and resulting in an accident. 

And so when you’re thinking about investing in cameras, what’s really important to keep in mind is to focus on the quality of that behavior detection from any camera provider. This is critical not only for you, but also for driver buy-in, right? The driver needs to value the camera just as much as you do. And so when I talk about quality, what I mean is that you don’t want to be falsely alarming drivers of unsafe behaviors, or even worse, miss the opportunity to provide field feedback of unsafe behavior. And so when you’re making a decision about a camera provider, it’s really important to look into independent, like, third-party research to ensure the provider that you’re looking at has been validated by a third party. 

Again, the quality is really important here because you don’t want to be falsely alerting a driver for things that aren’t happening. Then they’ll just become numb to the alerts. But on the alternative side, you also don’t want to miss the opportunity to alert them of an unsafe behavior and effort to prevent an accident. While cameras help identify risks, provide that feedback real time, you also need the tools in the back office right to help manage and document your actions to correct that unsafe behavior, which we’ll go into next. 

So coaching is core to any successful safety program. In order to successfully change driver behavior, lower your liability and costs incurred due to unsafe driving, you’ve got to extend your program beyond the camera. Installing the cameras is not enough. You’ve got to create a coaching program around this right? And so coaching can be both formal, kind of like monthly sit-down reviews and informal through things like those in-cab real-time alerts to the driver, or in-app video review, et cetera. And it’s important to find a solution that’s flexible and supports both of these methods. 

This type of flexibility is actually really important as you scale your fleet, because, again, you’re not going to be able to get to every single driver. So that’s where technology can lend a hand in helping you more efficiently manage your risk by notifying drivers of the unsafe behavior for you. And so for our friends in the legal department, it’s also important to make sure that all these coaching interactions are documented. 

For more formal conversations, you want to ensure the platform you choose allows you to document conversations which are kept as part of a coaching history for the driver that you can always look back on. And for cases where technology provides the first form of notification to the driver, audit trails should automatically be logged and visible within the coaching history as well. So you want to make sure all these interactions are also tracked through the platform as well. 

All right, we can go to the next slide. And so, as I mentioned, investing in building out your program, investing in technology, installing the technology, but also building a program around that technology is what’s going to give you the results that you need. And so, as we say here at Motive, investing in AI dash cams is literally the best insurance for your business to reduce liability in the long run. As you can see here, companies that have worked with Motive and built the program behind the cameras are able to see 35% fewer of road accidents 56% fewer safety incidents, up to ten X ROI in just the first year on their investment, and able to exonerate 72% of their cases. 

So, again, just to kind of summarize this, it’s a big investment upfront, but the payoff is so big in the long run. All right, next slide. Okay, so just to kind of summarize this and wrap this whole webinar up, I think there’s four main takeaways here. We first talked about culture. Culture is key. It’s going to influence every single part of your operation. If you don’t have safety built into your culture, no one’s going to care about it. So you need to make sure everyone takes part in this. We talked about hiring the right people, right? 

You have the right people on board. That’s going to make all the difference. Then once you’ve got the culture in place, you’ve got the policies, procedures, you’ve hired the right people. It’s all about embracing technology to kind of manage your operation more efficiently and effectively, and then all of this making up that safety management cycle. So if you seem to overwhelm, just remember it’s just six simple steps and follow the cycle and you’ll see the success that you need. All right? 

And lastly, if you guys have any other questions or are interested in talking to anyone else at Motive, we’ll send this deck out after the fact. But also within here, you’ll be able to find where you can get a demo or even visit our website. So thank you all so much for coming, and I think we’ll open it up to questions now. Yeah.

53:49 | Dan Smith

So I got the first question here. Is there a way to implement some sort of driver ELD performance review as part of a hiring process? For example, if I want to hire a driver that happened to use Motive in previous companies, can you make and provide us with his ELD and safe driving records? Short answer is no, that’s proprietary information. 

We wouldn’t share a company’s data with anybody else, especially another carrier. You’re going to have to go through the regular process of doing a verification that you currently use for DOT-required background checks. If they chose to give it to you, that would be the best you could do. But we don’t have the ability to give you another carrier data, even if it’s on our system. Sorry, that’s not the answer you probably wanted to hear, but that would cause a lot of legal issues, I’m sure. 

Any other questions out there? You guys have been pretty quiet today. Well, we don’t have a lot of stuff going on in here, so if you think of something after the fact, Mary and I are both available. Probably got a better chance of getting me because she’s busier than I am making this thing bigger, better, faster, stronger. 

So if you get questions after the fact, you can reach me again. It’s Daniel Smith or dan.smith@gomotive.com and we can put that in the email when it comes out. So if you have specific questions, we won’t leave you hanging. We’ll get you answers. If we don’t have anything else, I think we are going to wrap it up. Thanks to everybody for coming. Appreciate it. 

Please fill out the survey that helps us know how we can get better and what you guys want to talk about or what changes you would make to this program too. So appreciate you all. Thank you. Mary and I think we’re done. Bye.

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