Driving for Better Business has brought out an excellent and very practical guide to "Managing Your Work-Related Road Risk", covering the following Management Essentials:

• What is Work-Related Road Risk?
• Risk Assessment
• Safe Driving Policy
• Measuring Crashes and Costs

Here are our Seven favourite snippets from the guide, along with some links to related articles we've previously posted here:

# 1: It's always a good idea to start with "Why?".  "Reasons to manage work-related road-risk:

• It puts your staff at risk
• It puts other road users at risk
• It costs your business a lot of money
• It puts you, your business and your reputation at risk".

# 2: "To protect your business you need to:
Plan: Assess the risks in asking your staff to drive and create a plan to minimise those risks.
Do: Create a safe driving policy, communicate it well to your staff and ensure they follow it.
Check: Monitor compliance, collisions and costs.
Act: Continue to refine and improve your policies".
[see also our "Hallmarks" of best-practice].

#3: "Those not managing the risk effectively often fall into one of three distinct camps:

1. Ignorance: Not knowing that “something” has to be done
2. Avoidance: Knows that “something” needs to be done but doesn’t have time
3. Box-Ticker: Doing “something” they hope will be enough for legal compliance but not leveraging any business benefits.

Remember, the "something” applies to everyone who drives on business, however often or infrequently and whether they are in a company vehicle, their own vehicle (the “Grey Fleet”), or a hire vehicle.

And if you’re the one who makes decisions about drivers and vehicles, you’re the one who needs to ensure that the “something” gets done".

# 4: "Running cars and vans can be an expensive business.
While poor driving can obviously put your drivers and other road users at risk, it can also cost your organisation huge amounts of money, but often in ways you didn’t realise, eating into your profits without you realising".

# 5: "The obvious costs such as insurance and repairs can be scary enough but did you know the hidden costs of a collision are generally between x4 and x32 the cost of repairing the vehicle?  Staff absence is the biggest hidden cost to business following a collision. Whether it’s a spurious ‘whiplash’ claim or something more serious, this lack of productivity can really harm the business".

# 6: The guide features "a series of 50 questions to see if your organisation is doing all it can to effective manage its work-related road risk and to help you identify where you may have important gaps" [see also, our Are You Ready? questions]. Additionally, "Not all the questions are about compliance, some are about good practice and going beyond the legal minimum to ensure drivers and road users are as safe as possible, and that the company is maximising the benefits that come from better management of those who drive for work".

Find out more at www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com under the menu Getting Started/Next Steps

# 7: To help you Measuring Your Collisions and Costs "we’ve created a spreadsheet template on which you can enter the most important data.

You can download the template and the example at www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com under Getting Started/Measurement".

Source: Driving for Better Business