Understanding the cause of accidents

Can looking at the culture of an organisation and the personality of a driver improve driver safety? RoSPA's Keith Bell finds out

Managing occupational road risk is a challenge facing all companies who have employees who drive a vehicle on company business. Grey fleet (non-company owned vehicles) and company vehicles should be treated the same; the only difference is that the company has less control over the administration of the grey fleet vehicles (business insurance, MOT, service record etc).  
    
Many experienced drivers on an unfamiliar journey would have had the sickening feeling of suddenly realising the fuel gauge is reading zero, with no idea of where the next petrol station will be. Often, at this point, the driver will choose to drive economically in order to make it to his or her destination without running out of petrol completely. The reality is that we all know how to drive economically, but often choose not to.

MANAGING ROAD RISK
How does this link to companies managing their occupational road risk, their carbon footprint and controlling their costs more effectively?  
    
Many companies will do some form of risk assessment which may include licence checking, psychometric profiling, telematics, age, mileage driven, collision analysis, and so on. From this, companies can provide a range of interventions including e-learning, theory workshops and on-road training. Traditionally, this training has focused on car control skills and the general rules of the road, but despite many of us knowing the rules, controlling the car and driving economically, this doesn’t always happen and, as such, incidents can and do occur.

THE MATRIX
A way forward lies in understanding the Goals for Driver Education (GDE) Matrix, which was developed as part of an EU project. The matrix suggests that there are five levels to driver education: car control (level one); rules and procedures (level two); context of the journey (level three); personality of the driver (level four); and the culture of the organisation (level five).
    
Take the example of ordinary company driver Joe, who drives 30,000 miles a year for his company. Whilst driving on the motorway, he is involved in one of the most common crashes in the UK, when the traffic in front stops and he cannot. Joe has been driving for 25 years and has had several driver training courses as part of his work. He can recite the two second rule and the reasons why you should keep your distance. He was running late on the day of the crash and was trying to make up time as he doesn’t like to let people down. He had also recently been disciplined for his poor timekeeping.
    
So Joe knows the rules of the road and how to control the car, he even understands the reasons and principles behind this, yet he failed to apply this knowledge in this instance. Joe’s crash has more to do with internal and external pressures rather than his physical driving skill. Joe felt he did not want to let anyone down, particularly his line manager, as he had been disciplined recently.

RISK ASSESSMENT
In order for a company to manage its occupational road risk clearly, some form of risk assessment is necessary. The question is: what intervention follows from this? Basic driver training, car control and understanding rules and procedures, will only achieve so much. The issue is that the driver has to manage both the dynamic environment of driving as well as the business and personal pressures that will affect decision making.
    
Rather than dealing with the lower two levels of the GDE Matrix as in traditional driver training, companies need to find solutions which target the higher levels. This requires companies to adopt two approaches; to ensure the culture of the organisation does not put the drivers under undue pressure and to address driver behaviour and so encourage better decision making. These approaches need to be used in conjunction with each other.

LEADING FROM THE TOP DOWN
Managing the culture of the organisation must start from the top with effective leadership and cascade down to all managers at all levels. This ultimately ends up with the line manager, who should be given guidance on how they can manage the expectations of the business, while helping to keep their drivers safe on the road.
    
Drivers need to understand what causes them to behave in certain ways on the road and they should feel able to challenge their line manager if they are being asked to increase their road risk for the benefit of the company. Any driver and line manager behaviour courses used to address these areas of risk should be targeted to the outcomes of the risk assessment.

FURTHER INFORMATION
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