Overworked Safety Managers Can Result In Truck Accidents

Preventing truck accidents should be a top goal for trucking companies considering the grave consequences when collisions do occur. Victims can lose their lives or suffer permanent injury in truck crashes, while trucking companies can become responsible for the costs and consequences of the damage.

Many trucking companies take steps to try to prevent truck accidents from happening, including hiring fleet safety managers and creating safety and training programs for drivers and staff. Unfortunately, as Trucking Info reports, there are a lot of reasons why these efforts sometimes fail and trucking companies and truckers engage in unsafe practices that end up causing harm.

According to Trucking Info, many safety and training experts at trucking companies are overworked and end up having to deal with immediate crises that require prompt attention, rather than being able to handle designing effective training and safety programs. The job of managing safety and training in a fleet is described as: “rushing from one brush fire to another.” Unfortunately, when safety managers find themselves unable to take time to look at the big picture and design a training program that works, this increases the chances of safety efforts failing.

There are also many other reasons that could contribute to training programs and safety initiatives falling short. For example, other problems include:

• A lack of top down support from leadership in the safety program. Unless everyone at the top is on board, the program won’t be given the funding it needs, the program won’t be seen as a priority, and it will be hard for the safety program to be as effective as it should be.
• Lack of employee buy-in. Unless truckers who work for the company realize and internalize the importance of safety training, the company’s efforts won’t go far in changing behavior on the roads.
• Lack of focus. If safety managers try to fix too many issues at once and if training tries to tackle too many things, the entire program is likely to become ineffective.
• Poor execution of training programs. If the training program does not impart safety information in an engaging and understandable manner, the lessons being taught are unlikely to sink in.
• Failure to track results: The success of a safety program should be measured by objective metrics and there should be clear goals set in order to see if desired results are achieved.

And do in-house training. If they cannot work out the issues that make that training ineffective, there is a serious risk of a significant increase in truck accidents on the roads.

Michael J. Gopin

Michael J. Gopin has practiced law in El Paso since 1987. Even after more than 30 years, he still remembers his first jury case. It was two weeks after receiving his license, when he represented a person whose life had been forever changed after being blinded in a work-related incident...