Managing fleet drivers is challenging because you can’t be in the vehicle with them to monitor their behavior. Driver behavior significantly impacts how efficiently a fleet operates – you need your drivers to be safe and cost-conscious on the road. So how can you improve fleet driver behavior if you aren’t there to manage them directly? We’ve gathered some tips to help you out.
How to Improve Driver Behavior
No. 1: Create a Fleet Safety Policy
A fleet safety policy is crucial to creating a safety culture for your fleet. Your fleet safety policy should cover everything from hiring drivers to ensuring their positive behavior with measurable policies. These policies can address personal use of vehicles, defensive driving, distracted driving, and any other issues of concern within your fleet. Once you create these policies, review them often and keep them updated. Our Fleet Safety Policy Guide will help you create a fleet safety policy from start to finish.
No. 2: Prioritize Fleet Maintenance
A well-maintained vehicle is a reliable and efficient vehicle. Along with creating a safety policy, you should also create a maintenance plan. Your maintenance plan includes the procedures for vehicle checks, your maintenance checklist itself, and reviewing all vehicles to determine the baseline for your fleet. Our Comprehensive Fleet Maintenance Guide can help you build a fleet maintenance plan.
No. 3: Use Real-Time Alerts
You don’t want to wait for an accident to start thinking about driver behavior. You can monitor your drivers and get alerts before an accident ever happens with telematics. Some behaviors that your telematics system can automatically detect include:
- Rapid acceleration
- Speeding
- Hard braking
- Sharp turning
- Tailgating
No. 4: Create Driver Scorecards
You can use the telematics technology we mentioned earlier to track data about your drivers and get an overall view of their performance. With this data, you can create a driver scorecard that quanties how safely your drivers operate. Driver scores allow drivers to get a baseline for their performance and create awareness of any changes up or down. Azuga’s safety scores are calculated automatically from data gathered from telematics.
No. 5: Reward Good Drivers
Having these safety scores helps you determine where your drivers stand compared to other drivers. With this information, you can create motivators that encourage your drivers to strive for better scores. Motivators could include a newsletter shoutout to the best driver, a good drivers bulletin board, or even a full-blown rewards program. In this way, driver scores can gamify your safety tracking process so you can be assured of your drivers’ motivation.
Track All the Data You Need with Azuga
When you want to track data and use it all in one place, Azuga has your back. Our fleet management software connects with your vehicles’ telematics system to provide all the information you need on driver behavior. To learn more about how you can improve driver behavior with Azuga, try a demo of our software and see!
