High Risk Truck Drivers, How to Determine Who Is

We are talking High-Risk Truck Drivers this morning. 

Referencing the ATRI study, https://truckingresearch.org

John Farquhar
Summit Risk Solutions: summitrisksolutions.ca
1 226 802-2762
John@summitrisksolutions.ca
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-farquhar-9b88771a2/?originalSubdomain=ca

Chris Harris
Safety Dawg Inc: safetydawg.com
Chris@SafetyDawg.com
1 905 973 7056
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3764255/admin/

Transcript

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Yay. Thanks Chris. Hey, glad to be back here again on a, on a wonderful Friday and the last Friday of February that you know, and right now we're getting a little bit of snow tumbling through the sky, and I hear it's wispy around in different areas within Southwestern Ontario. So anyway, but I'll come to everybody And it took me a minute to find something. When you said the last Friday of February, I wanted to, Where we're getting that much closer to spring. So we'll see if that Anyway. So, so welcome everybody to another episode of trucking risk and insurance here on the podcast. So today we're going to talk about something that was in the news recently, but we're going to talk about high risk drivers, how to determine who is a high risk driver. So Chris and I are gonna kind of talk about that, share some information as well as some links so that you can access it so that you can determine are any of your drivers in a high risk category? Well, let's get at her. So let me ask a question because I actually let me pull up my notes ups and I've lost my nuts. I tell ya, going live on a Friday maybe is not the highest, or I think it's just cause it's Friday. Yeah. So it's been a busy Week. Yeah, it actually has been, I've been blessed with a lot of, I got three reports, very important things to get done today, too, for the, the captive. I've got a hand in, in one Asraq I promised the client submitting their Asmara submission today. And for those of you who don't know, Andra is alternate safety risk assessment. If you have a conditional CVOR and you qualify for this new mechanism, that MTO is brought out, you can maybe get your rating change from conditional to satisfactory on audited. So I've got a submission to do today. So I'm excited about that. Get that done. I anticipate before noon today in my client, of course, is quite excited to get that done, but good deal. We're talking about high risk drivers and John, just before we get into that, you also have a client that you're assisting with Ezra, right? Some, But we are looking to do that. Yes. Yeah. He wants to do, we got, we've got another month to wait before he reaches that 36 month area. So we've got some recommendations we're working on, get things cleaned up a little bit. And then probably April here we'll submit for a voluntary audit and hopefully he'll get picked for an answer because his current profile is sitting at 6% Beautiful. I just wanted to make sure that our listeners knew that I'm not the only one my co-host also does as DRA. So just to let everybody know. Yeah. All right. High risk drivers. That's what we're talking about today. Yes. Risky people risky. Other than Us. It's pretty risky if you join us on a Friday. Oh yeah. Is what I'm thinking, you know, so high risk drivers. What's the first thing we want to talk about high, how to identify a high risk driver. Sure, exactly. What, what tools could we use to determine a high risk driver? How would we know that a driver is high risk? What, you know, he's not going to come out and tell you and say, Hey, when you hire me just to let you know, I'm a high risk guy, you know what I, on other things, but nonetheless, so how do we determine what, what tools can we use to say or not to say, but to investigate and determine how this person would be a high risk driver? Well, So it doesn't, well, at least some of the insurance companies have some tools. Well, yes, some of them will, but some of the easy ones, and this is something that Chris and I look at quite frequently is your carrier profiles on your carrier profiles will tell you, is this guy high risk or not? So, and then his driver abstracts, you know, we'll tell you his PSP report will tell you, now it'll tell you as to what's going on activity-wise. But I guess to determine what type of high risk driver this driver is, that's where we need to go to some extra information to help us come to that determination. So that's where Chris you're right. Talking about those insurance companies. Yeah. And just to be, I don't know, sorry. I was gonna make a, a, a, a joke at the insurance safety people's expense saying that, you know, we're not talking about the tools that come from the humans because John and I just in, in defense there, John and I used to be those tools. Yes, we did. We did. We were, we retired from that toolbox. And just remember the people from your insurance company are truly out there to assist you and to guide you and to offer some suggestions because, and this is where John and I have a great deal of benefit, I guess, to our clients, is that because those people and people like John and I, we see so many different trucking companies, even the worst ones usually do something really good. Yeah. You know, so it's, it's really important that you listen to your insurance safety people. Cause they do have a lot of expertise and they get to see a lot of different trucking companies who do some really outstanding things. So take the recommendations with a lot of seriousness, but right, right. So they do have some tools that could assist, but you said, look at the CVR, look at the SMS, look at the PSP report. Hey, how about talking to dispatchers about know maybe the, the ELD system perhaps has, you know, an hours of service report and those drivers who are doing it. You know, one of the things that really jumps out to me, it's always high risk drivers is always a boat driver attitude. And yes, one of the things that I really find offensive amongst drivers and those who are perhaps the ones that are at the highest risk are the ones who love to use personal conveyance. Well, you know what I mean? Like your route should be planned in such a way that personal convenience is not a necessity. And yet there are, and there's always a small group of drivers. It seems. And every one of my clients who absolutely got to use PC in order to get things done, what are your thoughts there on Johnny, on PC? And we use that to get things done. It's, it's poor planning, right? And if you've got a driver, that's insisting that, then that should be a red flag because if you can't get the job done in the amount of time that you're allowed by the regulations, then something is a miss. So we need to look at rerouting, other other avenues to do. Maybe we've got too many drops on the truck to get the job done. Maybe there's too much pressure from operations and whatnot, but this is where we need to have that collective agreement to say, I can't get the job done. I seem to have to use personal convenience to kind of get these things done. It's like, that's not what it's for. Well, what is personal convenience for? Well, I We're talking high risk drivers. I don't want to get off track here, but Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I I've used a personal conveyance, you know, in the past, but it was more so I'm stuck here. I'm at this location, maybe a shipper's location. I'm out of hours and it's four o'clock in the afternoon and I can't get unloaded until the morning. So, but there's no place here for no food or anything like that. Whereas in town is 10 minutes away and I could use personal conveyance to drop the trailer, Bob tail into town, grab a bite to eat, relax. You know, I have a sandwich, whatever B and then make my way back to the customer facility to hook up, sleep for the night, if that were the case and whatnot. And I'm good to go. So that personal commands to go into town and back, it's not meant to be used to further your trip, you know, or extend your trip. That's not the purpose of it is for, as it says, personal convenience. So it's the carry your S your butt from one place to the other by itself with nobody else, no trailer on board or anything. Right. So anyway, that's one of the things I really do believe personal conveyance on high risk drivers are tied together because it's an attitude. Great. And what other signs? Yeah, I mean, and this is what some of the technology that's coming out. Some of these, the ELD systems and, and my friend ward, Workington over at fleet. Metrica how he can take the, the, the basis of your ELD systems and create up driver scorecards are these things are changing driver behavior and that's hope. And hopefully we're, we're changing it for the better of course, but we want to change high risk behavior into better behavior. You know, I've said for many years, I've used this phrase. Many times drivers don't want to be a bad driver. They just don't know how to be a good driver. You know, also if you're new into the industry, that's, I need mentoring, I need coaching. I need teaching of how to be a good driver. And that's where these scorecards come into play to kind of share with you what we're seeing through the telematics data about your behavior, whether it's aggressiveness, you're, overspeeding, you're pushing the limits and whatnot. You're not paying attention. You're distracted. All of these kinds of things. And telematics can help tell us that information, you know, along with your carrier profiles, your driver abstracts and whatnot, all information that will point to risky behavior. Yeah. And I just wanted to point out one thing. I did a review of a captive member about two weeks ago, and they had switched ELD providers just before last year's review and their new ELD provider, which is on the list of Canadian ELD approved and a Canadian device premier device, by the way. And I'll say it, it was the Isaac system they'd switched to The, and is it a coincidence that they've had the Isaac system in their trucks for a, just over a year that they're every one of their metrics have improved? And I don't mean just a little improvement. Their crashes are down, their CVOR violations are down, their SMS violations are down. And they were explaining to me, describing to me how the, the system has the red, the, the red light, the Amber light and the green light. And, you know, is it just a good year? I mean, let's be honest. It could be, we need longer than a year, but it is pretty interesting that they implement a system that has a coach built into the telematics and all of their metrics have improved. Yup. Yup. So that's, that is a kudos to the system that, cause there are, there are lots of systems out there. There are better systems than others. So, so, and that's, what's cool about Isaac. I really like is it really helps to coach it takes it to the next level and beyond to be honest with you, then just your ELD and by the way, we're not paid by Isaac, just so you know. No, but we are promoters of them because they do provide a good tool. So yeah, We don't even have an affiliate link or anything that we could even make a buck. Hey, Isaac, reach out to us Kind of sponsor this podcast. Isaac. I think you guys would be good here. Yeah. Do I just wanted to let our listeners know that there is no, it's just an honest opinion that we're giving. And as I said, I haven't even worked with the Isaac device, but I liked the result that this one client got. So I'll just throw kudos out there. That's a success story to them too, to be listening to the data, looking at the data, reviewing the data, to make those changes and help those drivers be better drivers. Yep. So what else can we do for high risk drivers? We've talked on the safety scores, basically the CVR, the SMSP is B. Now we talked a little bit about telematics because things like the hours of service reports, maybe personal use might be an indication. Now we talked about the briefly about driver coaching that would improve the high-risk behavior, perhaps what other things are available. Well, there's a really neat report available and it provides some percentage benchmarking so that you can take certain types or specific types of violations and rank them in a percentage basis. So what it'll do is it'll help to take those profiles or safety profiles, the driver abstracts and whatnot. And we can look at the violation types that they're having and rank them. So now we can kind of say, Hey, you know what? This driver's a higher risk driver than this other driver based on this information. So that report is right here in the actuary study, they did a predictability of a crash index and that's where they utilized a lot of percentage numbers to say, Hey, as an example, if you've had a violation of this type, you are this percentage more likely to be involved in a crash. So it's, it kind of makes it really handy. So thinking reckless driving, for instance, reckless driving, if you've had a reckless driving violation in the last 12 months, you're 114% more likely to be involved in a crash. And these stats here are being utilized by a number of insurance companies. And they're putting them into a Excel spreadsheet for you to populate with your drivers and listing and downs and whatnot. And this will help you even further to determine the riskiness of your drivers. And this is by the way, the new up abated, because many people have seen this years ago, I forget the year, the first study came out, but this is the updated version Versus the 2018 version. So that It was 20 11, 20 18. John, let me just show our listeners how they might get this study themselves, because it is significant in, in length. That was page, what was that? 15? You said 15 or something like that. So to get to that, what I did is I came here and what did I type in John? You told me, You put in crash, predictor, Crash predictor. And it came right up like that. And I simply clicked right there. And we got that. I don't need that on the screen. And then to get the actual report, you click here, I completed that information and that brings up this complete document now. And as I say, John, you told me to go to page 15 or was it 15? Yep. Just 15 has got the, those a percentage numbers on it. So, and, and this report's free. This is available to anybody for free download. And I encourage everybody to pull this up and utilize this. Now again, if your insurance provider has pro has given you a high risk driver tool calculator to utilize awesome, but also keep in mind, make sure that these percentage numbers are the correct percentage numbers in your tool, because I've seen some of these duels where they're reflecting 2011 statistics. So, and this is updated information. So Hey, when you're analyzing behavior and risk use the latest numbers. Well, yeah, I mean, and they are, it's easy to get it's reliable information and the, they get it into a lot of different backgrounds. Let me see if I can find that one part, John, where you talked about, cause you said it's in here. This is all by age. Okay. I won't bore our viewers. Yeah. Down just a little bit further. I think you'll see the next percentage page and it divvies it up between the genders. Yeah. This is all by age right now, but there's a lot of useful information. So John had pointed out there is a difference between genders as well. Yep. So Ashley, good study document Ashker insurance provider. If they have a high risk tool that you can use such as a, the ones that I've seen so far are XL spreadsheets. Right. And I think it's Northbridge and AIG, are they the two that I know have them? Yup. Yup. Yup. So if you're insured with Northbridge or AIG asked them for their high-risk tool calculator, give it to you For free. Yeah. Beautiful help. It does take a bit of work to get the information in there, but once you get it all up to date and get all the data in there, it's really easy to maintain. Yep. Well, and, and, and the thing is that one of the big tricks is you're looking at it over a 12 month period. Don't look at it over three years because if that driver had that incident three years ago and has had nothing since then, there's been improvements and it is more than likely you have, or somebody has provided that driver with training, coaching, mentoring, which is also going to help to eliminate those previous violations and prevent future violations from coming into play. So, you know, there's, it's kind of like a, he provided, we provided the driver with training to address those high risk behaviors. And so now we start with a clean plate and move forward and make sure that we don't have any future violations. Well, and that was going to be my kind of last question. So we've taken the tools, we've analyzed all the information that we can get ahold of. What do we do when we identify a, what I believe is a good driver. I'm a trucking company owner. For instance, we all know that drivers right now are difficult to get reliable. Drivers are extremely difficult to get. So I'm not apt to fire somebody. But if I did come up and use these tools and identify a high risk driver, what do I do? Well, that's where we engage in conversation to start with, to address the issues at hand. And then we want to provide some coaching, mentoring training with that driver to address those issues as well as creating preventability opportunities. So we don't have these types of incidents in the future, but one of the big things I really want to stress is we need to go a step further and not just deal or address that with that single driver, this, if this was unpredictable or this came out of nowhere where, wow, that's really unorthodox for that driver to have that type of violation. Wasn't that means it's possible for any driver in the fleet. So that training and coaching needs to be shared with all drivers so that we can make sure that they all have that opportunity to prevent it from happening to them. Right. So you're saying training, you mentioned conversation first. So you want to bring the driver in, sit them down or sit her down and say, Hey, look at, this is what we've we have noticed and let's discuss it. So really not too much of a discipline involved. It's it's really a discussion saying, Hey, we want to improve these metrics scores. It could be many different things. And there there's opportunity here to bring awareness into the conversation, to be able to say, Hey, we've noticed this, have you noticed this? And it's possible that the driver didn't even realize that they were doing something and they didn't think it was a major, a major situation, but it could be due to some outlying factor that's caused this situation to happen. You know, whether it could be stressed within the workplace, stress at home issues that are going on that are outside the workplace that, you know, we don't know of. We're we're not able to address and per day, but by having that conversation to go, well, we're not talking about discipline. Discipline's not even on the table here. Discipline would come into play. If you refuse to do the training and to better yourself, then we would have no choice but to discipline. But right now it's all about awareness. Are you aware of what's going on? We've seen these, we want to bring it to your attention. We want to have an adult conversation and say, how can we rectify this? We've got some training over here and coaching we'd like to help you with, would you be receptive to, you know, taking some training opportunities and improving your skills? Yeah. And I mean, it's not like we don't live in a world full of stress at the moment, you know, between COVID protests, as we are, you know, doing this live, we've got the Ukrainian situation happening. So I mean, there's a great deal of stress right now for everybody. The other one. And then the other one that I have to deal with regularly, my mother, I got to deal with my mother watches, this show, you know, family, I'm telling you, I don't know what to do. We do have a viewer. I don't know who it is that is watching today. So I would love if they Better watch out, you might make a comment. Yeah. Well, the viewer can make a comment. I'll give you a shout out. But yeah. So you, you say you, if, once you have identified the high risk driver, and by the way, one thing I thought of that we didn't mention was fuel economy. Often those drivers with the highest fuel consumption are the higher risk drivers. And again, none of these things that we're talking about are absolutes. It doesn't mean that a driver with bad fuel economy is a high risk driver. It is an indication that they might be a high risk drivers. So, but that's another one. So anyways, you, you want to have an adult conversation, bring the situation to the forefront, make the driver aware of it. And then, well, we got a thumbs up there, Johnny, Hey, thank you. Make the driver aware of it. And then if the driver doesn't start to make positive changes, you may at a, you know, relatively near date, but further down the road, talk about discipline and talk about, you know, more behavior change. Right? Right. Well, and you know what the bonus part is, motor carriers need to understand that their insurance companies don't want to impose strict re requirements and force you to terminate drivers. They don't want you to do that. They know how hard it is to find drivers. They know how hard it is to keep drivers. What they want you to do is take somebody. That's got some risky behaviors or some bad behaviors, and coach them help them to be a better driver. And that driver will appreciate that if they don't now, they weren't meant for you to begin with, but this is an opportunity to help improve your retention rates. Keep those guys that are really good, need a little help. You know what? Just because they've had a situation that went sour doesn't mean we terminate them. We need to sit down and talk about, well, what happened? How did this happen? What can we do to rectify this from happening again? Keep in mind when you have a big crash, you just spent a lot of money on training because it's highly that driver's going to do that same crash again. It's one of the most expensive forms of training. John. Awesome. We're hitting almost 29 minutes already. My goodness. So high risk drivers was the topic today. If, and I'm hoping you are, if you're getting value from all of this here, where is my gosh? Darn yes. There it is like, and subscribe to the trucking risk and insurance podcast. Last thing I want to mention is I've been in a email conversation with the media C I guess it's the federal government media department and John and I are going to be alerted to a news release coming out next week. Apparently I honestly, obviously don't know what it is because the government doesn't release it, but they do imply at least that the trucking risk and insurance podcast would be interested in the subject matter. So stay tuned, John. And I will certainly discuss that. If it comes out early, they said they would send it to us early. So it may be subject to this Monday's live, who knows, but either way, stay tuned for that because it could be something to do with driver, Inc. I don't know what it is, but that's how the conversation started was some clarification on driver Inc on the owner-operators. So maybe some news coming out next week. All right, Johnny, my friend. Thank you so much. It was good with that. Let me, we'll just go to, to see if this works. Hey, that's it. So that's it for this week, the trucking risk and insurance podcast, where John, my co-host far quar of summit risk solutions and myself safety dawg. Talk about subjects and have some guests. And by the way, we've got some interesting guests getting lined up for the very near future. So stay tuned for that. Thanks so much. That's it for this week.