Not One, but Two Good Reasons to Act on Your Compliance & Safety Data
Drivers and juries hold carriers to a high standard. Professional drivers expect carriers to run a safe operation to allow them to come home to their friends and family. Juries remind carriers that they have a "duty to act" to correct unsafe or non-compliant conditions before crashes occur.
Carriers must monitor, prioritize, and act on their safety and compliance data to uphold their responsibilities to drivers and the public. Also, acting on your data can positively impact recruiting and retention and make your company more defensible in litigation.
1. Keep CSA Scores Low and Avoid Unnecessary Turnover
Carriers with low Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) scores are attractive to professional drivers. Avoiding crashes and citations is the best way to achieve low scores. Challenging CSA violations or appealing crashes that are "non-preventable" will only lower scores so much.
Carriers with higher CSA scores have higher Inspection Selection System (ISS) scores, often used to decide if a driver gets flagged for inspection. Drivers are inspected more frequently at carriers with (ISS) scores of 50-100. Inspections can reduce a driver's productive time.
Also, avoidable turnover is another risk of not acting on safety and compliance data. You don't want to terminate a driver because they no longer meet your hiring criteria, and you failed to coach or train them. These days, a driver with a few correctable unsafe behaviors may be better than a driver you hire as a replacement.
Some terminations may be necessary when coaching and training are ineffective at changing risky or non-compliant behavior.
2. Don't Be Negligent
Another risk of not acting on your drivers' data is being proven negligent after a crash if you failed to supervise your drivers. Large verdicts can result if your company is found negligent for failure to remedy a non-compliant or unsafe condition.
A plaintiff's attorney would try to prove carrier negligence if there was a failure to follow policies, procedures, or reasonable practices that proactively find, coach, remediate, or terminate high-risk, unqualified, or non-compliant drivers.
All adverse information collected from commercial motor vehicle operations is discoverable after a crash. The fact is, carriers are held accountable for not correcting unsafe behavior they should have known about, whether they review and act on the data or not.
Timely detection and correction of unsafe behavior reduces safety and operational costs and minimizes the impact of litigation if a crash occurs.
Closing Thoughts
Carriers avoid citations, crashes, and unnecessary turnover when they use a system or process to identify, prioritize and coach negative compliance data, dashcam clips, and telematics events, along with electronic logging device (ELD) alerts. The J. J. Keller® DataSense® platform with predictive analytics can help you manage risk and better support and attract drivers.
Know the data you are collecting and act on it. Don't let your dashcams, electronic control modules (ECMs), and ELDs just collect evidence.
About J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc.
Since we began as a family-owned company in 1953, our purpose at J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. has been to protect people and the businesses they run. Today, serving 500,000+ companies across North America, our associates are proud to make a larger impact than ever. Transportation, construction and industrial organizations of all sizes rely on our expert insights to create safe work environments and simplify complex government regulations. They trust our diversified portfolio of solutions – cloud-based management tools, consulting, professional services, training, forms, PPE and safety supplies – to safeguard workers, reduce risk and build operational confidence. www.JJKellerDataSense.com
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