36 Oregon Trucking Association, Inc. Oregon Truck Dispatch The Many Hats of Safety By Adam Williamson | OTA’s Director of Training & Development SAFETY IS A multi-faceted area of responsibility that covers a variety of disciplines. With carriers naturally placing much of their emphasis on driver safety, it can be easy to oversimplify the safety management role into concepts such as defensive driving or general DOT compliance. While these areas of focus are certainly important in the overall scheme of things, safety involves much more than that, often requiring the safety professional to wear many different hats. The following are additional areas of responsibility that carriers cannot afford to overlook. OSHA and EPA Compliance. With so much attention and energy applied to DOT compliance, it is often overlooked that many drivers do additional work outside the truck and come under other areas of regulatory oversight. OHSA rules are applicable to your yard, warehouse, and shop environments, and even if your drivers spend limited time in these work areas, the standards apply to them just as much as any other category of employees. Environment focused regulation has existed since the original EPA act in the 70s, but in recent years we have seen a massive increase in both laws and regulations targeting the use of carbon fuels. This directly impacts the trucking industry. Even if all of these new laws/ regulations are not fully in effect, now is the time to begin developing plans for updating equipment and operations to reflect the direction of the industry. Safety professionals will have a lot on their plates over the next few years juggling everything being thrown their way. Following the best practices. Consistent compliance can be challenging just by itself, but carriers must not fall into the trap of thinking that compliance always equals safety. Even full compliance is often only the bare minimum, and regulators are frequently behind the curve when it comes to safety innovation and development in trucking. One prime example of this is vehicle cameras that—while not a required technology like ELDs—are increasingly being used by carriers to improve their safety performance significantly and measurably. If a new or well-established innovation is available that can improve your safety performance, why would we wait for it to be mandated before implementation? Safety should never be reduced to the bare minimum, and carriers must get in the mindset of looking beyond basic compliance to the best practices. Employee health and wellness programs. Following good safety practices while on the job is important, but the overall well-being of employees extends beyond their day-to-day jobs. What a driver does in terms of diet, exercise, and sleep habits will have an impact on how they perform their work responsibilities as well as their overall quality of life. Many work-related accidents are directly connected to either obesity or poor health in general. Drivers in particular must renew their medical certification at least every two years and chronic health conditions can threaten their qualified status. More and more, carriers and the trucking industry as a whole are recognizing that providing drivers with education and resources that support healthy living has value. With a driver pool that is generally aging—the median truck driver age is in the midfifties—and a vested interest in younger drivers not adopting the poor health choices of previous generations, investing in a robust wellness program for your drivers increasingly makes sense. Risk management and Safety ROI. While the human element of safety is always the top motivator, it is also legitimate to appreciate how safety can help your bottom line. Done correctly, safety is not just a line-item expenditure that never sees a return on investment. Accidents and injuries are expensive with overlooked budget impacts (lost time and productivity, remedial training, etc.). A good risk management program should be evaluating safety performance not just from the standpoint of preventing accidents, but also tracking and estimating how these investments and practices are positively contributing to the financial outlook of the company. Especially when pitching the investment part of the equation to upper management or ownership, a case often needs to be made showing how the investment will pay for itself. Carriers that do not appreciate this relationship between safety and profitability are not doing their business any favors. There is more to safety than we often realize. No business model for trucking can thrive long term while cutting corners in this critical area of operation. More than ever, the safety professional must broaden his or her outlook as to the scope of their responsibility. There are a lot of hats to be worn in safety and each one has a purpose. SAFETY
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