A company relocates a driver who has worked in Florida for the past decade and never driven in snow to Maine, where he then gets into an accident. What did the driver do wrong?
That’s the wrong question, said Jim Higby, lead of safety and compliance strategy at Motive. This is the right question: did the company set up an infrastructure to train the driver to perform differently in an entirely new environment?
That is a Safe System Approach, which doesn’t place the onus of safety on the driver alone, Higby said last week at Motive’s annual Vision conference held in Nashville.
“I think a successful culture of safety is one that is really rooted in the Safe System Approach, which means that all of the different aspects of the company, all the different players, have a role to play so that you are essentially triggering everybody in the company to be able to contribute to safety,” he said. “When you do that, it becomes much more durable, becomes much more intrinsic.”
Higby was joined by Motive customer CoolSys’s Director of Environmental Health & Safety Shawn Martinez, Together for Safer Roads Executive Director Peter Goldwasser, and Geico Head of Strategic Partnerships Chris Sions during a session that focused on building a high-performance safety culture.
Higby said creating a culture in which safety is paramount is about spreading accountability across an organization because all things safety are directly related to the economics of a business and should therefore be important to every department.
Safety affects retention, which matters to human resources, recruiting and marketing. Safety affects the bottom line, which matters to finance. Safety affects equipment, which matters to maintenance and so on.
“When you have a healthier, more holistic approach and when safety equals performance, that's the ball game,” Higby said.
Progress over perfection
Martinez, who manages safety of roughly 2,600 vehicles for HVAC services company CoolSys, said a company needs reliable tools for visibility to create a superior safety culture. The company uses Motive’s safety solutions for that, including cameras and software.
Sions, who was an athlete for many years, said there is a saying in sports: “the truth is on tape.” The same goes for the trucking companies he works with, he added.
He said having video and data that monitors and measures safety helps fleet insurers work through claims faster, can exonerate drivers involved in incidents, and can lower insurance premiums, but it’s also an effective coaching tool.
The trucking fleets he works with that have safety at the core structurally measure safety, as well as coach, through technology, Sions said.
“The other thing is really working to try to catch people doing things correctly, and that can help lower the barrier in a lot of ways to whatever you're trying to do,” he added. “Celebrate the wins … What's measured gets managed, and what's rewarded, gets repeated.”
Martinez said that’s why CoolSys emphasizes progress over perfection.
“If your Motive score is 83, don’t look at it like you need to get to 99. Look at it like you need to get to 85,” he said, adding that it’s a step-by-step process and that rewarding small improvements has been a more effective strategy.
The company started two-and-a-half years ago with a Motive trial at two of its branches located in the most challenging places to drive. When those locations proved that the dash cams had a profound impact on safety outcomes, Martinez said he knew early on that CoolSys needed a robust reward and recognition program.
Recognition carries 80% of the impact on driver behavior in Martinez’s book, and reward is 20%, he said, noting that companies should ensure the rewards are something the driver actually wants. The best way he said he has found to do that is by surveying drivers. Martinez said CoolSys also recognizes its coaches. Higby added that recognition costs nothing.
“I'm a firm believer in being extremely generous with recognition and rewards because I'd rather pay $100 for a safety prize, than $50,000 for a brand new van or someone being injured,” Martinez said. “I know that we're limited by budgets. We're limited by our senior leaders making decisions, but the ROI is there.”
Starting at the top
CoolSys’s auto loss payout in 2023 was over $5 million; it’s now projected to be $400,000, Martinez said, adding that the company no longer pays a worker’s comp premium and is instead self-insured. He said dashcams are responsible for that difference.
That’s the ROI, he said, and with those numbers, it’s easier to get buy-in from leadership.
Martinez said it is critical to have the support of senior leadership and for them to understand that they’re in the best position to impact behavior by communicating their philosophy to frontline leaders.
Frontline operational leaders, whether it’s a regional director, branch manager, etc., drive the messaging, the coaching and the culture, he said. He recommends having senior leadership regularly meet with operational leaders to discuss KPIs and have open roundtable discussions about challenges, best practices, goals and objectives.
“Operational leaders need to understand that they’re safety leaders, and it needs to be part of their discussions, not just financials and production,” Martinez said.
Balancing empathy and accountability
The key to a great safety culture is aligning everyone companywide on what the North Star is – the definition of success at every level, from driver to manager to CEO, Goldwasser said.
CoolSys’s North Star is “everyone makes it home.”
Martinez said CoolSys’s coaches point to themselves, to department heads and even the CEO when training drivers, emphasizing that no one is a perfect driver among them and all can improve. They take an empathetic approach, understanding that humans make mistakes, he said.
“It's similar to an inspiring coach or an inspiring teacher, where you balance firmness with empathy, and our leaders achieve this by being tough on the problem, taking it seriously, but being very supportive of the driver,” Martinez added.
He said CoolSys trains its leaders to understand that coaching is an opportunity to foster growth and trust with their drivers, rather than relying on blame or fear.
Goldwasser affirmed that the most effective leaders have strong and sincere connections with their employees.
“The best leaders in this case are the ones that are empathetic and the ones that understand that safety is truly one of the few aspects that cuts across – when thought about appropriately and expansively – all the different divisions of the company,” he said.
