Are your workers driving safely while on the job? There are both human and financial reasons to stress motor vehicle safety with your employees. Let’s take a look at what you can do to promote safe driving on the job and off. We’ll focus on distracted driving and seat belts.
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A new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and released by the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS) found that in 2013, U.S. traffic crashes cost employers $47.4 billion in direct expenses like medical care, lost productivity, liability, and property damage.
The study also showed that employers could control costs by promoting safe driving habits, including seat belt use and the elimination of speeding, drunk driving, and distracted driving both on and off the job.
According to a new report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of work-related injury deaths in the United States, accounting for 23,865 deaths from 2003 to 2015.
Distracted Driving
Whether your workers drive for business travel, making deliveries, client visits, commutes to worksites, or other job reasons, distracted driving is a risk to other drivers as well as your own employees. According to NIOSH, 16% of all motor vehicle crashes in the United States involved a distracted driver in 2014. Distractions not only cost lives but also cost employers $72,442 on average per nonfatal, on-the-job crash injury.
Cell phones are a well-known distraction associated with driving. Between texting, making calls, and using handheld devices for other purposes such as looking up directions, distracted drivers put their own as well as others’ lives at risk. Yet, hands-free phones are not necessarily safer than handheld devices. As an employer, you can set cell phone policies and practices that clearly communicate to workers what your company or organization does and does not allow.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), it takes about 5 seconds, on average, to read or send a text. But, in that span of time when your eyes are on the phone and not on the road, a vehicle traveling 55 miles an hour can travel the length of a football field. The NHTSA claims that distracted driving killed 3,477 people in America in 2015.
NIOSH offers a key message to send to your employees: Your brain has limited ability to perform two tasks at once. When driving becomes secondary, you pay less attention to possible dangers on the road. Behind the wheel, driving is your primary job.
Seat Belts Matter
About 2.6 million workers drive trucks that weigh over 10,000 pounds (large trucks). According to NIOSH, about 65% of on-the-job deaths of U.S. truck drivers in 2012 were the result of a motor vehicle crash. More than 1 in 3 truck drivers have had a serious truck crash during their career, and 1 in 8 has had 2 or more. According to 2013 statistics, 1 in 6 drivers of large trucks don’t use their seat belts. More than 1 in 3 truck drivers who died in crashes in 2012 were not wearing seat belts. NIOSH claims that buckling up could have prevented up to 40% of these deaths.
As an employer, you can help keep your drivers safe by:
- Committing to driver safety programs at the highest level of leadership;
- Establishing and enforcing driver safety policies, including requiring everyone in the truck to buckle up;
- Involving workers in decisions about how to put seat belt programs in place;
- Promoting seat belt use in training and safety meetings; and
- Addressing factors that contribute to crashes, such as drowsy and distracted driving, in your driver safety programs.
Check tomorrow’s Advisor for some tips from OSHA to promote safe driving on the job.