REDUCE CRASHES.
LOWER COSTS.
MAINTAIN COMPLIANCE.

Even as vehicles are being equipped with more sophisticated safety features and traffic fatalities overall are going down, fatalities involving large trucks have increased in recent years. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Report, even after 5 years of increasing, fatal crashes dropped slightly overall in 2017. However, fatalities involving large trucks increased from 2016 to 2017, with 4,761 people losing their lives in crashes involving trucks. Of those, 28%, or 1,300 of the people killed were truckers, and the other 72% were in passenger vehicles. The news was even worse for multi-vehicle crashes involving trucks, where the number of fatalities jumped from 267 deaths in 2016 to 343 deaths in 2017, marking a 29-year high for fatal large truck crashes. Across the board, crashes with trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds, which includes dual rear-wheel pickup trucks, was the only category of crashes where fatalities increased. According to the report, however, the biggest increase in fatalities came from crashes in vehicles weighing between 10,000 and 14,000 pounds. The number of crashes among those vehicles doubled from 2016 to 2017, while trucks exceeding 26,000 pounds showed a 3.8% increase.

With low unemployment rates and a tight labor market, companies face mounting challenges to find and retain good drivers. Unlike industries where work is conducted from a desk or behind a counter, any position that requires driving is difficult to fill. Hiring managers have to ensure that the worker is not only reliable at performing their primary task — such as delivering packages or going on sales calls — but also has to make certain they are safe and skilled behind the wheel. Providing expert training teaches drivers what they need to maneuver safely on the road, but it takes more than that to retain great drivers and employees. Company culture plays an increasingly important role in employee retention. The challenge of driver retention is most widely noted in the trucking industry, where driver turnover continues to affect operations and lead to changes like increased pay, benefits and bonuses. Even so, companies continue struggling with retention and are looking for ways to not only get good drivers in the door, but make them stay. One way to improve retention while at the same time boosting morale and employee loyalty is a simple but effective benefit that most, if not all, workers are looking for: Happiness.

Workers in the fields of utility and telecommunications face a higher-than-average number of safety challenges on the job. On any given day, they’re working with high-voltage equipment, exposed to extreme weather conditions and may have to perform their jobs from great heights. If they’re working alone, the challenges are even greater; they also have to manage the stress of checking their own work and not having a partner to help. That can be particularly difficult on days when an employee is tired or not feeling well. The National Safety Council points out that slip, trip and fall hazards are common around such worksites, and working outdoors, where ground can be wet and uneven, only increases the likelihood of a workplace incident. While safety managers usually provide training and information about on-the-job dangers, some of the other dangers commonly experienced by utility and telecommunications workers may not always get the attention they deserve. And some of the greatest challenges these workers face will happen as a result of the vehicles they’re driving.

Emergency workers are committed to keeping the public safe, but the nature of their jobs often puts them in peril. From fighting fires to combating criminals, emergency responders face a number of dangers in their daily duties. While many of the dangers are readily apparent, what’s too often overlooked is the danger that workers are in when they’re behind the wheel. Yet for both firefighters and law enforcement professionals, roadway incidents were the second leading cause of death from 2011 to 2015. For firefighters, only fires were responsible for more deaths, and acts of violence such as shootings were the No. 1 cause of death for police officers. A study published in the April 2018 journal Accident Analysis and Prevention found that police vehicles were 1.8 times more likely to crash when driving in emergency mode, meaning they have lights and signals activated. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also found that emergency responders faced an increased risk of crashes, with an estimated 4,500 ambulance-involved crashes happening every year. Of those, 34% result in injuries and an average of 33 people are killed each year as the result of an ambulance crash. Since ambulance occupants typically are not wearing seatbelts, they tend to have more severe injuries and a greater risk of fatalities. In fact, 45% of job-related deaths among emergency medical services workers are the result of highway incidents, primarily crashes, according to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. Resolving these on-the-job and behind-the-wheel dangers begins with identifying why they occur and implementing the training and awareness programs needed to change behaviors. Here are three primary factors affecting first responder driving safety.