Quick Guide: Positive Safety Culture

As a fleet or health and safety professional, it’s natural that most of your fleet safety efforts will be directed at reducing risk for your drivers – after all, individual driver behaviour is the single biggest contributor to crash risk. That’s why at DriverMetrics®, we spend the majority of our time helping organisations accurately profile individual driver risk and to change high risk behaviours.

However, individual driver behaviour does not occur in isolation. It’s also critical to  pay close attention to ensuring that you are fostering a positive safety culture in your organisation.

A positive safety culture means that an organisation views safety as being an overriding priority. This can be observed in individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, a company’s health and safety management.

Companies with a positive fleet safety culture are characterised by communications founded on mutual trust
between the collective and individuals, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety, and by their willingness to implement fleet risk management interventions.

This moves us away from the unhelpful view that drivers cause elevated risks or it is the company’s fault that crash rates are so high. Rather it is how drivers and company structure come together to behave in a way that is safe. It is a combination of behavioural, situational and management factors that determine collision risk and safety is everyone’s responsibility – not just the driver.