By Darryl Cooper, president, Cooper Equipment Rentals published online by Canadian Contractor.

An average job site is a busy place with site inspectors, cranes lifting materials into buildings, dump trucks loading and unloading, suppliers and subcontractors delivering equipment. A lot of different people coming and going and a whole fleet of your own equipment in constant movement. The number of things that could go wrong is nearly endless– that is, if you’re not paying attention.

You may have safety requirements in place to mitigate common hazards– hardhats and other PPE, aerial safety harnesses and training around electrocution and slips, trips and falls. You may even have Certificate of Recognition (COR). But what about the potential hazards that are off-site? Are you protecting your workers (and let’s be honest, your business) by implementing safety practices behind the wheel? Can you be sure they are following the right protocols around speeding, breaking and distracted driving? Are you monitoring your fleet to ensure they are driving safely? And are you encouraging better driver behaviour…or identifying and correcting poor driver behaviours?

Instilling a holistic safety mentality in your employees is essential   

There’s always more work to be done when it comes to keeping people safe. It’s a shift from seeing safety as another box to check to one where your company is invested and committed to protecting the well-being of workers.

We’ve made safety a pillar of our culture, but our efforts tend to focus on our equipment, our branches and customer sites. Driver and vehicle safety is always hard to measure because of the remote nature of the work. You don’t often realize you have a problem until after the infraction or incident happens. If not effectively addressed, the problem could potentially lead to the loss of a commercial operator licence or a compliance audit from the Ministry of Transportation. Your workers may be speeding, driving aggressively or driving while distracted, and unless you have tools in place to monitor these behaviours– you may only find out what’s really happening after there is a problem. Left unaddressed, you risk big fines and, in the worst of cases, your people (or others) getting hurt.

When you put a worker behind the wheel of a company vehicle, you both take on a lot of risk. Driver behaviour and attitude are critical to performance, both on and off the road. But establishing and maintaining best driving practices takes work. It’s a real change in culture—one that sees safety as an investment rather than an expense.

READ the full article at Canadian Contractor