In 2019, the Dutch town of Vlijmen installed a checkout at a grocery store called a “Kletskassa”- a chat checkout. The idea was to provide a checkout where people could take their time, talk with a cashier, and not have to rush. It was a powerful concept to help combat a growing concern, especially among the elderly — loneliness. The experiment met so much success it has since been expanded to around 200 stores.

What a novel idea, actually talking to each other! If you’re a fleet safety manager or director who oversees drivers, how often do you talk to them? When you’re made aware of unsafe driving behaviors, do you talk to them to find out what happened, or is there an automatic punishment without finding out the story?

Several years ago, NETS launched a Post-Incident Coaching Toolkit for our members to help managers address at-fault collisions within their fleet. While it provided guidance for how to investigate the cause of the incident, it didn’t delve into the why — in other words, what was the behavior that led to the incident?

If your driver was speeding and caused a collision, maybe it was because he felt pressured to finish all his required sales calls in a day and was running behind. If your driver was looking at her phone and crashed her vehicle into a guardrail, maybe she was concerned about the storm she was driving in and was looking at her weather app on her phone to see when the storm was going to clear up because your company doesn’t provide automatic weather alerts.

Talking to drivers can help resolve why a driver behaved a certain way and can provide insight into changes your organization can make to help prevent these collisions in the future — changes like making adjustments to the sales bonus program for meeting required sales calls that will allow for better driver decisions, or installing technology that provides weather alerts to drivers to prevent the need for checking a phone.

With the help of NETS’ Sponsor ABA Technologies, an expert in behavioral science and driver behavior, we have recently updated our toolkit to include a behavioral component to help fleet managers determine the “why” behind an incident. We’ll be releasing it to our members at our upcoming annual Strength IN Numbers Fleet Safety Benchmark Conference. Focusing on driver behavior is only one of many fleet safety topics that will be addressed at the conference. And there will be a lot of talking — between fleet safety peers, with fleet safety sponsors, and with fleet safety experts sharing insights and best practices for advancing fleet safety. It’s not too late to join us and start your own conversation! 

Susan Hipp

Executive Director

https://trafficsafety.org