How training drives safety: Turning culture into action behind the wheel

For fleets focused on long-term safety success, building a culture of safety is the starting point but not the end of the road. Culture may give you the foundation, but training is how you make it real.

Without a clear and consistent training program—and strong teamwork to strengthen it—even the best cultural values get lost in the day-to-day demands of the job. Training matters not only for new drivers coming into the fleet but also for experienced drivers who need ongoing reinforcement and development.

Training for new drivers vs. ongoing safety

I see fleet training in two categories: new driver training and ongoing training for all drivers. Both are crucial to reinforcing a culture of safety and require a real commitment from leadership, safety teams, and operations to effectively implement.

Orientation and onboarding are your first and best shots to introduce a new driver to your culture, where expectations are set and habits start forming. However, orientation shouldn’t just be about rules and regulations. It’s also an opportunity for cultural immersion, a chance to demonstrate who we are, how we drive, and why it matters. It's important for you, your family, and the motoring public.

What I’ve learned from decades in this business is that new drivers bring with them the culture of the previous companies they have worked for. If you don’t make your culture stronger, more consistent, and more actionable, they’ll default to old habits. That’s a risk no fleet can afford. Bring them into your culture through more meaningful and consistent training.

Onboarding new drivers to reduce risk

At fleets with high turnover rates, new drivers make up a significant portion of the population. At one carrier I worked with, drivers with one year or less made up 43% of the total driver base but accounted for 68% of all accidents. Why? Because we hadn’t brought them fully into our culture through consistent daily communication, safety messaging, and training.

To address this problem, we introduced five-week check-ins followed by a 45-day support visit focused on making sure drivers were aligned, supported, and improving. We’d sit down with them and discuss how they are doing, what the data says, and what success looks like going forward. Those touchpoints are essential. It is important to look at leading indicators that come from your telematics and video, then work with drivers to proactively help them fix behaviors that could put them and the motoring public at risk. It is also just as important, if not more so, to reinforce the positive safety results they achieve.

Orientation may be the spark, but ongoing training, reinforced through daily consistent messaging by organization-wide teamwork, is the fuel. Regular touchpoints on key events that are leading indicators for crashes, such as following distance, hard braking, and distracted driving, help keep safety front and center—reinforcing what matters, adapting to what’s changing, and keeping the culture alive.

Making road tests teach safe driving

Many fleets treat the road test as an observation, which will result in a pass/fail, but why waste the opportunity? Instead, turn the road test into a mechanism to teach rather than simply observe.

Start off with the specific behaviors and language you want reinforced every day behind the wheel. If a driver doesn’t know your preferred lane change protocol or following distance expectations, use that time to show them. You may never ride with that driver again, so make that road test count. You will still be able to evaluate their driving skill and determine if they are a safe driver or not.

Engaging training for safer fleets

The best training sessions aren’t just informative but engaging. This means avoiding the dry, one-way presentations that lead to glazed-over eyes. Every part of the experience, from pre-trip inspections to telematics reviews, should use adult training principles to effectively convey information.

And this doesn’t just mean watching videos. Drivers must engage, learn, and demonstrate that they understand the material in some sort of follow-up knowledge check. This is how you make sure what’s taught in a classroom actually translates to safe behavior on the road.

Cross-department training for safety alignment

At many fleets, training is siloed in the safety department. But if fleet managers and dispatchers aren’t reinforcing the same behaviors and language, then you’ve got a disconnect. Drivers hear one thing in orientation and something else from their fleet manager, which undermines the entire system.

Every employee who works with drivers should go through the same training drivers did— not to learn to drive, but to speak the same language. When we use phrases like “lean and look” or “six-second following distance,” everyone should know what that means and how to support it. Culture only sticks when everyone is working together to reinforce it.

Turning culture into action through training

Done right, training builds more than knowledge; it builds alignment and empowers teams to work together seamlessly to make each other better. At one carrier, we held biweekly meetings where safety and operations teams came together to review progress, address gaps, and share feedback. We ranked fleet managers by their safety performance—not to shame anyone but to recognize the top performers and give others a model to follow. Peer accountability works when people feel like they’re part of a shared mission.

Training is where safety becomes more than a slogan. It’s how drivers learn what’s expected, how teamwork aligns across shared goals, and how culture moves from intention to action. Culture matters, but culture without training is just talk. If you want safer outcomes, you need to train like it matters—because it does.