Coach Your Drivers to Safety and Success, Part 2

In the last blog post, we discussed the importance of coaching and ensuring everyone is on the same page before starting the process. Once you start, it’s important to realize that triggering video is only the first step in the review process. Once a video is triggered, review by an expert analyst is a necessary step to verify and quantify the risk.

With today’s buzzwords, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision, fleets are rushing to rely on data-driven technology to make life-saving decisions. Unfortunately, AI-driven analysis is not yet as effective or reliable as human review. Human review continues to provide verifiable results and actionable analysis. Expert review is essential to ensure the process is unbiased and all driver behaviors are measured similarly and consistently; it also ensures scoring and prioritization of your riskiest drivers aligns to your company’s specific safety policies.

Ultimately, expert review as part of a Managed Service program eliminates the need to review and coach on every event, saving fleets time and enabling coaches to focus on the risky behaviors, drivers and sites. A Managed Service provides the information necessary for the prescribed coaching workflow, which ensures continual improvement and bottom-line results.

A Managed Service program supports your coaching efforts by providing the ability to coach thousands of drivers. How? By doing the “heavy lifting” of reviewing and prioritizing events, so you can focus your efforts on coaching those drivers who need it most. In addition, the program helps build rapport between coaches and drivers, helps you to recognize good driving skills (in addition to those who need improvement), and provides performance measurement to gauge the success of your efforts.

Three Steps to Coaching Success

As mentioned in the previous section, it’s imperative to follow a prescribed process to ensure that all drivers are coached – and measured – in a timely and unbiased manner. As outlined below, the three steps to coaching effectiveness are:

1. Prepare – Preparing for each coaching session ensures that you know what you will discuss with each of your drivers, how you will present the information and what you expect from your driver. It also ensures a level of professionalism so that drivers realize the importance of the coaching sessions and will approach them in a similar manner.

2. Coach –  The best way to start a coaching session is to show the driver his/her video and ask them what they see. Let them explain what occurred and then discuss the situation. This helps ensure the driver is aware of what occurred and why you are coaching on that occurrence.
3. Summarize – It’s important to make notes of your coaching session. It’s easy to forget what was discussed and the agreed-to next steps to ensure safer driving. With appropriate notes, you can remind your driver should the behavior continue and need further coaching.

Measuring Your Coaching Effectiveness   

Once you’ve begun coaching, it’s important to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. The key to driving your program results are analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The three KPIs essential to manage your program and ensure your focus is on the right person, at the right time, are Safety Score, Percent of Events Coached and Coaching Impact on Score.

These KPIs enable your organization to align top to bottom on performance metrics, understand “better or worse” and focus on what needs improvement. This makes it straightforward and easy to operationalize – enabling your managers to actually save time because they are talking to the right drivers about the right skills that need improvement.

The impact of this approach is that fleets often experience collision frequency reductions of 50% or greater in the first year of deployment. And, they continue to see results in subsequent years because they have a standardized, consistent approach.

To gain more insights into coaching, download the eBook, “Coach Your Drivers to Safety and Success” today!

Next week, we’ll continue our discussion on analytics and look at tips to take your driver improvement program to the next level.
Click here to read part 3.

• Posted by Melissa.Senoff@smartdrive.net
• On 21 May 2019