Drivers with the best MPG are safer drivers, according to a study by Schneider National.

One-Size Does Not Fit All When It Comes to Training and Safety

We learned about the study during a webinar from FleetOwner (which you can watch for free). There were several other interesting tidbits from the Schneider National’s Senior Vice President Don Osterberg, including their approach to training and safety. Essentially, Osterberg pointed out that in a human endeavor, there is no silver bullet that will solve all safety and training needs. People learn differently. There are different indicators that a truck driver needs training. Thus, Schneider’s answer is to layer multiple solutions:

• Pro-TREAD online and in-cab training
• RAIR driver management system
• GreenRoads driver monitoring
• In-person coaching
• On-boarding program
• and many others

(You can read an in-depth discussion of the Schneider training programs in an interview with Schneider National’s Director of Training, Alan Weisinger).

Safer Drivers Have Better MPG, Reports Schneider National Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

The Carrot: Reward Drivers for Training

Rewarding drivers to take safety training can take several forms. Some fleets pay drivers on an hourly basis for time spent taking the training. Since most Pro-TREAD lessons take less than an hour to complete, a full hour of pay is a good deal.

Another form of reward is part of a safety bonus. These programs tend to give “points” to reinforce the behavior that is good for the fleet and the driver. For example, a driver may get a monthly bonus for:

• Completing all vehicle inspections
• Finishing a Pro-TREAD training class
• Avoiding any moving violations
• Not having any collisions
• Driving above a certain MPG
• Below a certain number of hard-braking events (as measured by safety equipment such as DriveCam or GreenRoads)

Because you likely don’t have the time to manage a program like that, there are third-party driver incentive companies that will administrate it for you such as CA Short and Prime Inc. Pro-TREAD can integrate with any program like this.

Simpler rewards can be giving first choice of routes, shifts, or trucks to those who complete training first. A manager can sort the list of those who’ve completed training of a certain module by completion date. At one of our largest fleets, this simple reward system has created a very, very competitive culture that leads to some drivers emailing us asking when new lessons will be posted.

The Stick: Consequences for Missing Training

The flip side of rewarding a driver for taking training is creating consequences for those who miss an assigned lesson in timely manner. Assigning a specific lesson and setting a deadline is critical — without establishing expectations, any discipline will seem arbitrary and will hurt morale.

In the broadest terms, many fleets set training as a condition of employment. More plainly, the driver takes the lesson or they’re fired. Other fleets will withhold loads until the training is complete. Yet another method is to give the driver a choice: take the training online in under an hour, or attend a three-hour safety meeting over the weekend.

Social Pressure: Making Training Normal

You can offer safety bonuses or threaten drivers with older trucks, but if after new employee orientation the driver hears that “no one around here pays much attention to training,” your safety program is sunk. The carrot-and-stick approach to training will go a long way to encouraging drivers to take training in a timely manner.

Another way to set yourself up for success is to make sure senior drivers buy in to the training program. Whether it’s introducing new technology, best practices or training initiatives, companies have found positive results by recruiting their more experienced drivers to test out the new initiative. As a manager, you’ll need to listen to their feedback and do what you can to act on it. Their participation will help other drivers feel comfortable and confident.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there are two types of drivers who need training: those who don’t know how to do something right and those who choose not to do it right. The carrot-and-stick approach works well for those who don’t know how to do something. The social approach is important to fix those who through attitude, habit or laziness choose to put the fleet at risk.

Combination: The Best of All Three

Training has been shown to reduce crashes, warehouse injuries, moving violations, and inspection violations. So investing time to get your drivers on-board with training will pay for the fleet. And a company culture that puts value on drivers’ time (a 30-minute online lesson compared to a three-hour safety meeting on a Saturday) tends to have better morale.

Using a combination of these methods means:

• Constantly explaining the benefits of the rewards
• Setting clear expectations that make it easy to avoid consequences
• Heaping praise on those who “do the little things right.”

Rewards, discipline and social pressure can work together to make training and safety the new normal.

Safety Director Tips: Getting Drivers to Take Safety Training Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

Dr. Jim Voorhees, our CEO, quoted in Transport Topics. Click the image to be taken to TTnews.com (login required).

 
 
The point Jim makes is that there are a ridiculous amount of distractions in a truck driver’s cab, as well as in everyone’s automobile. Crying babies in backseats, the stereo, CB radios, getting into an argument with your significant other, eating french fries, ladies putting on makeup. Heck, there was a bus driver across the river in Portland, Ore. who was caught reading a Kindle while driving!

But banning cellphones only in trucks makes politicians look good (well, unless the study is flawed, which it was).

Driving is a skill that can be mastered quickly (especially with good training). It requires vigilance, but within a few years of driving, your brain has excess capacity. How many times have you driven home while thinking about work, only to realize you have no real memory of your commute?

The proposed total cellphone ban is both overkill and misses the solution to the distracted driving problem. Hands-free devices allow a person to carry on a conversation just as well as if the person were sitting in the passenger seat. One could argue a hands-free device is safer than an in-cab conversation, because the driver isn’t tempted to try to read the passenger’s face or body language.

The fact is that good driver training about recognizing and dealing with distractions is the best answer. When drivers know what to look for, when they pick up the cues of their own distraction, they tell us that they “shake myself out of it.”

Cracking Walnuts with a Hammer: Cellphone Ban Overkill and Misses the Point Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

Vigillo's Top 10 CSA Violations show that basic pre-trip inspections could dramatically reduce vehicle maintenance CSA scores.

Of the top ten CSA violations, seven could be prevented with one simple step: a pre-trip inspection by your drivers. Inspecting the truck before driving is the law, and yet 70% of CSA violations are truck-related!

Over on LinkedIn (login req’d), managers asked: “How do you really know that your drivers are doing a proper vehicle pre-trip inspection?” Sure, your drivers may be checking all the boxes on their daily vehicle reports, but are they actually inspecting their trucks?

It’s a great discussion, with several real-world suggestions.

• Tie a red ribbon around the dipstick or something else they need to check.
• Bring in a DOT inspector for everyone to watch what they inspect.
• Have the manager do spot checks weekly to show “it really matters.”
• Reward, rather than punish, finding problems.

Managers Agree: It’s All About Training and Repetition

But the advice, again and again, came down to training the drivers about what to look for in a pre-trip inspection, and what a DOT inspector will ding them for. You can’t assume that drivers — even experienced truckers — have been trained by someone else to inspect brakes, belts, or even tire pressure!

New Pre-Trip Inspection Lesson, Including CSA Infractions

Today, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve *radically* updated our pre-trip inspection lesson. It provides your drivers the specific knowledge they need to do a pre-trip inspection. It gives them a checklist to use, and tests their knowledge of what to look for. And it’ll give them the confidence that they can do the inspection in less than 10 minutes.

Our training tests their knowledge along the way, and tells them the severity and weight of violations in CSA.

See the Pre-Trip Inspection Lesson Yourself

This video is just a short teaser of our full, one-hour lesson. (Want the full demo? Just drop us a line.) Though the lesson takes an hour, a pre-trip inspection should take much less time. And the more your drivers do it, the faster and more thoroughly they’ll inspect the truck.

Pre-Trip Inspection Lesson Outline

• Introduction
• Importance of a Pre-trip Inspection
• Inspection Requirements
• Areas of Focus
• Getting Started
• Cab and Under the Hood
• Walk Around Inspection
• Tractor Checkpoints
• Coupling System Checkpoints
• Trailer Checkpoints
• Inside the Cab
• Vehicle Controls

CVSA Out-of-Service Criteria Don’t Match CSA Regulations

Lastly, your fleet is in a heap of trouble if inspection reports are ignored by your maintenance team, or if your maintenance team lacks the money or manpower to address them: an excellent article from Vigillo and Aon discusses this. We highly recommend it, because the criteria from the CVSA don’t always match what a CSA inspector will flag.

Pre-Trip Inspection: Train Your Drivers to Understand Vehicle Maintenance CSA Rules Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

 
 
 
ITI: How do you balance the needs of the business and the demands on drivers’ time with training and safety?

Weisinger: Our organization’s #1 core value is safety, and there’s a level of commitment from our executives on down to that safety value.

We also believe that training is an enabler of the business, not a distractor. It takes much more time for a driver to wait for a wrecker if they’ve been in an accident than to put them through training. We are eliminating waste by making sure drivers have what they need to stay out of trouble.

 
 
 
ITI: You train new drivers different based on their experience. Tell us about working with experienced drivers.

Weisinger: Our training follows our driver hiring model. When I first stepped into this role, about 65% of our new hires were inexperienced — either straight out of school or coming to us only with a learner’s permit. When the economy contracted, we hired only experienced drivers, and set aside the infrastructure for training new drivers. In the past 18 months or so, we’ve adopted a 50-50 hiring mix of experienced and inexperienced drivers.

With experienced drivers, we have about a 3 1/2 day onboarding program. There is not much behind-the-wheel training in this program. We do a road qualification test, obviously. We help them understand Schneider’s communications, our Qualcomm units, and introduce them to the various departments they’ll work with (like maintenance and safety). We make sure everyone understand the regulatory requirements, because even with experienced drivers, not everyone does. And we work on getting from A-to-B with trip planning. It’s really more orientation than training.

For experienced drivers, we bring them back in after just two weeks. That’s not much time, but we’ve found that it’s pretty traumatic going from one company to the next. A lot of them are hesitant to ask questions. They tend to believe because they’re experienced, everyone expects them to know all the answers already. So after two weeks, they come in and spend time with a trainer. It lets them ask questions, plus they get behind the wheel of a driving simulator or truck. It’s an additional safety check.

 
 
 
ITI: What do you differently with inexperienced drivers?

Weisinger: They come in for 4 days of what we call: “hard skills training.” That means they’re behind the wheel of the truck. We make sure their truck skills are good and solid. After that, they spend about a week hauling freight over-the-road with an experienced driver that we call a Training Engineer. The training engineer has the discretion to keep them longer if needed. After a week, they know what trucking is about. Most of them stay, but some of them realize that maybe it’s not the right career for them.

After their time on the road, they spend three days in soft skills training: Hours of service, map reading, proper logs, learning the Qualcomm, driving simulators, emergency procedures. Then they do Skills Qualification Testing — sort of like a final exam. That’s done with a neutral party: a training engineer who hasn’t had any experience with them.

Finally, they complete what we call “SafeTrack.” We bring them in 4-6 weeks after initial training. They will come in and go through a road test, demonstrate their skills around the truck and show their regulatory understanding. Bad habits can be formed relatively quickly, and SafeTrack lets us correct those.

 
 
 
ITI: Who are these people training your drivers?

Weisinger: We have those who work in initial driver programs in the classroom and the truck, and then we have operations support representatives who work with drivers post-incident or accidents.

For behind the wheel training, we have about 300 Training Engineers. For many of them, they appreciated the investment of time someone made into them early in their own career, and so they want to pay it forward. For a small number, you’ll hear the opposite: “My training experience wasn’t positive, and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen to someone else.” A lot of them come from a military background, and they have a great willingness to contribute. Obviously, a lot of them enjoy the additional money, because we compensate them for their time and effort.

 
 
 
ITI: How has your training changed over the years?

Weisinger: Training is ever-changing. We spend a lot of time listening to our customers, and our own operations teams. We’ve sought to make training more dynamic, including new technology. Several years ago, when we heavily recruited and trained inexperienced drivers, we invested in redesigning training for that pocket of drivers. We incorporated computer-based training, and simulators.

Schneider Nat’l: Training is an Enabler, Not a Distraction, Says Alan Weisinger Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

New Partnership between RAIR and Instructional Technologies, Inc.

Today we’re very excited to announce a partnership with RAIR. Through this partnership, trucking companies now have a single tool to monitor driver behavior and when necessary, change it through training. Truck fleets now have a single tool to move from risk management to risk reduction.

With the CSA scores a fact of life for the trucking industry, standard safety measures for drivers and fleets is today a reality. With CSA scores, companies can see their problem drivers and fleet-wide problem areas. Today, truck fleets can turn to a number of companies who provide that information through “driver scorecards” and other monitoring tools.

RAIR has taken the lead in this space for a number of reasons, especially the breadth and depth of information it collects:

• Paper logs
• GPS data
• Driver vehicle inspections (DVI)
• FMCSA data

Unlike its competitors, RAIR does more than monitor safety performance. RAIR can help carriers identify the driver behaviors that lead to poor safety performance. This is possible because RAIR is in the unique position of having the behavioral data (such as driver logs and DVIRs) to compare to public safety data.

Knowing Isn’t Fixing

But it’s not enough to simply know there’s a problem. A fleet needs to take action to help an unsafe driver change their habits. Or they need to change an institutional pattern that’s leading to roadside infractions. The RAIR and Pro-TREAD partnership closes the loop for fleets.

RAIR is more than a reseller. RAIR lets carriers access Pro-TREAD training from within its system. That allows carriers to identify problematic behaviors and immediately assign training to change it.

Don’t Just Manage Risk, Reduce It

RAIR’s CEO, Greg Lofy, put it this way: “For example, a user of RAIR’s DVIR auditing program can currently identify a driver who routinely fails to perform proper pre-trip inspections on his tanker. With our new partnership, the user will be able to navigate directly from RAIR’s DVIR reports to Pro-TREAD to assign the Tanker Pre-trip Inspection lesson to that driver.”

The Benefit of Targeted Training

• Improved CSA scores: By getting out a consistent message, the fleet will see fewer infractions.
• Less driver turnover: With fewer infractions comes fewer reasons to fire drivers, leading to decreased turnover.
• Higher profits: Fewer accidents mean fewer lawsuits and improved lifespan for equipment.
• Lower insurance rates: A safer record for the fleet can eventually result in lower insurance rates.
• Reduced liability: Since assigning training is only a few mouse clicks away, there’s less time (and fewer miles) between an infraction and when your fleet did something to fix it.

And here’s the press release about the partnership, if you enjoy those sorts of things.

More about RAIR

Founded in 2001, RAIR provides web-based safety and compliance services to over 300 truck and bus companies, representing more than 300,000 drivers. RAIR services include paper and electronic (EOBR) driver log auditing, CSA data analysis and management, driver qualification (DQ) file auditing and online DQ files, paper/electronic driver vehicle inspection report (DVIR) auditing and online vehicle files, drug testing and more. Because of its expertise in regulatory compliance issues for DOT-regulated fleets, RAIR has fostered long-term relationships with many of the largest and most prestigious fleets in trucking, distribution and transit, including 50% of the “Top 100” carriers in the U.S. and Canada. RAIR is a division of DriveCam, Inc.

Don’t Just Manage Risk, Reduce It Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

Speeding is like a little snowball that turns into an avalanche of fines. Because being pulled over for speeding means the state trooper might conduct an inspection and find other violations.

Slowing down your drivers requires a cultural change. Training like our speed management course is an important step to sending the message that it’s bad for everyone. If we can help you change the culture in your fleet, get in contact with us. We’re happy to talk through what we’ve learned from hundreds of our other clients over the past decade.

Fewer Speeding Tickets for Your Truck Driver Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

I’ve been writing about Safety, Security and Compliance lately. There is an interesting notion in trucking about the 300-30-1 rule. The idea is that if someone performs an unsafe act, 300 times nothing will happen. About 30 times, it causes a close call with very minor damage. And 1 unlucky time, it’ll cause a serious accident that results in really hurting some poor person. Or killing them.

A lot of management in the trucking industry play the odds — they just rely on luck rather than take the pro-active approach of quality training.

Reading this brought back to me the motto of the Field Artillery (where I spent 10 years): cedat fortuna peritis. It means “Skill Trumps Luck.”

How many trucking companies depend largely on “luck” to control their accident rate? A company that trains drivers twice a year? A company whose idea of training is to let older drivers tell “war stories” to drivers once a quarter? A company that picks training that costs the least or takes the least amount of time? Training isn’t mandatory, but neither is survival.

Skill Beats Luck Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

How do drivers, fleets, and customers avoid the dreaded “slip and fall” accident”? A minute of forethought and a culture of not accepting unsafe conditions will go a long way to reducing Workers’ Comp claims. Colorado’s Supreme Court upheld a $10 million dollar slip-and-fall award to a trucker who fell in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Greeley, CO. Like most “accidents,” it was utterly preventable (which is a true shame because the driver’s had three spinal surgeries and half a million dollars in medical bills since the fall).

If you read the article, you’ll hear that the Wal-Mart let their deli’s grease trap overflow for SEVEN DAYS (ew, gross), which caused a grease slick in the parking lot. That’s pretty much the story right there. So what could’ve been done differently?

• The store manager or deli manager could’ve walked the grounds of their store. If they’d noticed it, presumably they’d delegate someone to fix the issue. Lesson: You need to put eyes on the ground if you’re responsible.
• An employee must’ve certainly noticed, yet no one was motivated to say anything or fix it. Lesson: A culture of safety makes it OK to report problems.
• The driver could’ve walked the area before trying to carry a load in, and hopefully would’ve noticed the problem, reported it, and found an alternate route into the store. Lesson: Especially in an ever-changing landscape like a parking lot or loading dock, pre-walking the route once helps you find and work around problems.

Avoiding the $10 Million Workers’ Comp Accident Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training

Without revealing any names, here are a few doozies we heard about:

• A driver hit a gas meter at a mall, which caused the mall to be evacuated.
• A driver hit an awning on a church, which pulled over the entire brick facade. Of a church, it bears repeating.
• A driver hit a transformer at a grocery store, knocking out power.
• A driver tore off a fire escape from a building in an alley.

Avoiding Fixed Objects: A Lesson to Stop Parking Lot Crashes Instructional Technologies - Home of Pro-TREAD Online Training