Maximise Employees Road Safety

Research indicates that driving is the most dangerous thing you can do as part of your job role. This is why the Health & Safety Executive have stated that the ‘risks should be effectively managed within a health & safety system’. The HSE suggests that driving should be treated as any other work related activity that involves risk. This does not just include haulage and heavy vehicle drivers but employees on the road in any type of vehicle, for any purpose that is work related.

What follows is advice on how employers can help to minimise the risk to their employees on the road:

Tiredness kills

This is one of the most important messages that a company’s Health & Safety policy should express. Every year, thousands of drivers are involved in collisions that could have been prevented had they or the other driver not been so tired. The main risk areas for tiredness on the road are;

• When employees are doing shift work and it involves driving home after a night shift; the body’s circadian rhythms work on sunlight and so working through the night would put them out of synch and could cause extreme tiredness. The primary risk times are between 2am and 6am.
• When alcohol has been consumed. Even a glass of wine on a business lunch can make a driver sleepier in the afternoon. The prime risk times are between 2pm and 4pm.
• Employers should ensure that employees are aware of the legal drink driving limits. Emphasise to your employees that they should not drink and drive and if they do your company will fully co-operate if the authorities need their assistance. Many people do not realise that even if you have had some sleep after drinking, alcohol could still be present in the body for a number of hours afterwards (and this could even cause employees to be over the drink drive limit the day after alcohol was consumed). Hangovers can often cause tiredness and a decrease in awareness.
• Roads such as motorways can often be monotonous and tiredness can occur more easily on these types of roads.
• Medicines such as antidepressants or antihistamines can cause drowsiness.
• The last one is common sense but yes, when you have had less sleep than usual, you are more likely to have a tiredness related road traffic accident.

Awareness Saves Lives

At the different stages of an employee’s recruitment and retention, raise awareness of the issues above and focus on the following:

• The importance of getting the right amount of rest for them before they undertake a work related journey. Employees can spend too much time on their out of work social activities and it can affect the amount of sleep they get, thus affecting their work and driving performance.
• Similarly, a long drive home after working all day could increase their risk of an accident. Implement a policy where if an employee is over a certain amount of time away from home at the end of their working day then they are allowed to stay in a hotel at the company’s expense.
• The hazards of falling asleep at the wheel need to be emphasised, as do the times of day when an employee would be most at risk of feeling tired.
• Advice employees of what they can safely do if they are feeling tired on the road.
• Help employees to plan their journeys more effectively so that their driving time is kept to a minimum; purchasing a vehicle tracking system is the most effective way of doing this.

Consider the Alternatives

Make sure that your drivers are not making un-necessary journeys by, where possible, using email, phone and online meetings/web conferences as the first way of communicating, rather than face to face meetings.

Contracted Hours

Where possible, make an employees working day as close to the contracted hours as possible. This way, there will be less chance of employees getting ‘over-tired’ and ‘burnt out’ during the working week. Employees will also be happier. You could also set a limit of the amount of miles employees are allowed to do over a certain amount of time such as a week or a month. Vehicle tracking systems can be used to monitor if employees are exceeding these ‘safe driving limits’.

Journey Planning

As stated above, vehicle tracking can help you to plan your employee’s journeys more effectively. However, another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the weather conditions and time of the day. Try to avoid planning really early starts, especially in the winter months when there is less sunlight, and take into account that if weather conditions are bad. Even if you have planned your driver’s journey well geographically, if you are sending them out into a storm or blizzard you are putting them at risk of long, tiring, hours on the road, and a multitude of other risks!

Journey Monitoring

Using technology such as GPS vehicle tracking systems, employers are able to monitor their driver’s journeys in real time as well have the ability to look back at historic journeys. Tracking systems are already being used by many businesses as a key contributor to ensuring mobile employee’s overall health and safety. A good example of how tracking systems can keep employers informed of potential health and safety issues is by monitoring a drivers journey time. Many tracking systems can provide a real time notification if an employee has been driving for a too longer period without taking a rest break; these alerts can often be delivered in the form of an email or a SMS.