WHAT EMPLOYERS CAN DO

Provide driver training. The Ontario Safety League helped countless people brush up on their driving skills, including hard rock miners, aging nuns, taxi drivers, Meals on Wheels volunteers, and summer students who drive municipal vehicles. “We’ve had companies cut their crash rate by 35%, based on drivers being more aware, more alert to what they’re doing,” says Patterson. He adds that if a company with 500 drivers reduced its crash rate by 35%, it might reduce its insurance premium by as much as 25%.

 
For companies that already have a strong safety culture, it tends to percolate through to road safety on and off the job. A mining company with offices in remote parts of the world invested in proactive driver training for every employee, every employee’s spouse, and every employee’s children of driving age under 25. The HR manager explained to Patterson, “If I’ve got a guy in the deepest jungle of Peru and his wife is involved in a simple crash in a parking lot, his mind won’t be on the job, it will be back home. So I’m going to fly him back. What additional cost is it for us to tune up the driving skills of not just our employees, but their families?”

 
Be aware of people’s commutes. Bearing in mind that a fatigued driver behaves much like a drunk driver, it helps to find out who has a tough commute. “If you have an employee who’s working a 12-hour shift and ends up doing 14 hours, you may not know if they have 1.5 hours drive at the end of that round or if they started at 5:00 a.m.” Adjusting the shift to avoid peak traffic times, or letting employees work from home at least once or twice a week, can help.

Offer flexible work hours. Long-distance or congested drives make it difficult to predict an arrival time. Think of the salesperson with four meetings a day, all over town. And think of your 9-to-5 commuters. “We find people are driving in the most complicated traffic at times when they are either sleep deprived or they’re focused on arrival time,” says Patterson. “If you’re late one more time and you’re going to lose your job, you might take incredible risks in the morning. Maybe half a second off, you’ve got a crash.”

That, he adds, is why Dominos and other pizza franchises have discontinued their “30 minutes or free” guarantee – in response to a number of significant crashes involving their vehicles rushing to arrive on time. 

Evaluate people’s driving. A driver’s bad habits were once considered personal quirks, but since Bill C-45, employers need to know who the speeders and tailgaters are. Just as you want proof of a worker’s ability to operate other machinery, consider doing the same for your fleet drivers or on-the-road sales force. You can have their driving evaluated by an instructor, or put your drivers through a simulation. Patterson says that in one test group, the 10% who crashed badly in the simulator crashed within 18 months of the simulator test.

Get them off the road. Find out if there are groups of employees within the same postal code, and consider offering an incentive for those who find an alternative to the car commute. Transport Canada has partnered with several Ontario municipalities to create SmarCommute, a program that helps employers and commuters to explore other choices such as carpooling, teleworking, transit, cycling, walking, or flexible hours. With an ever-growing number of vehicles on the road, this could not only improve safety but ease traffic congestion and pollution.