Improving culture is necessary for fleets to improve driver's safety

Successful fleets are always looking for ways to be safer—but there is no one single solution to make a fleet’s drivers as safe as possible. A holistic approach is necessary to tackle the various practices and relationships for safe operations.

According to Rhett Roberson, director of recruiting and employee engagement for Christenson Transportation Services, culture is that much-needed comprehensive approach for operational safety.

“It’s easy to backburner culture, especially in markets like this where we’re all just trying to get the freight down the road, get paid for it, and keep afloat,” Roberson said. “It’s easy to focus on the stuff that’s hard-hitting right now. But I think this more holistic approach is a real way of engaging drivers, engaging people hiring good drivers, and keeping those good drivers.”

Roberson and Ethan Slaughter, chief financial officer for Christenson, spoke on developing driver-centric cultures at the Truckload Carriers Association’s Safety & Security Meeting in Indianapolis this month.

A culture-focused approach is a comprehensive way to improve operational safety—along with retention, employee satisfaction, bid success, and more.

Culture as a retention tool

Yes, an effective safety-focused culture will foster greater employee adoption of safety practices. However, a holistic culture improvement also benefits retention of a fleet’s safest drivers. Culture is both a tool to reinforce the value of safety and a competitive driver for employee retention.

When a company lacks cultural purpose, it limits an employee’s work to something merely transactional, Roberson said.

“We have to establish more than just coming to get the paycheck on Friday,” Roberson said. “If it’s only about the paycheck, the next company that offers them two cents more per mile to run down the road, that’s where they’re going.”

A company culture that fails to meet employees’ need for purpose makes retention difficult. This can leave a fleet struggling to hold onto its best—and safest—drivers.

“Safety is a product of culture, right? It’s a piece of a larger pie and when we start to silo these things out and look at issues within culture as individual issues, we really miss an opportunity to lean into some of the synergy of starting with the foundation of a strong culture,” Roberson said.

When a fleet plans to improve their safety culture, they need a specialized plan of attack. Improving culture takes much more than a refined mission statement.

“It’s really about getting drivers to resonate with your cause,” Roberson said. “Drivers that resonate with these ideas and initiatives around safety are more likely to be safe drivers.”

Driver buy-in requires fleets to foster trust, communicate clearly, and look inward.

Allow for trust

Trust is the foundation for communication and cooperation. Drivers should feel safe asking questions and sharing information.

“Drivers want to be involved in a community. They want to find a place that they belong; people that they can trust,” Roberson said. “Trust is that first step to being able to share vulnerability.”

A workplace that responds to questions with hostility will reduce driver trust. A driver with little trust in their colleagues will be much less likely to speak up about unsafe practices or to ask questions to improve their own safe driving. On the other hand, highly trusting workplace relationships foster communication, feedback, and mutual improvement.

“We can’t have drivers feel like they’re burdens for asking questions, especially in safety scenarios,” Roberson said. “We want to open the door and in fact praise that courage it takes to be vulnerable, ask questions, and say ‘hey I don’t necessarily know all the answers.’”

Communicate clearly

Just as trust is important for sharing information, open communication is important for consistency and confidence among employees.

“You must say it before, during, and after. People need to know during a process like this why we’re doing it,” Roberson said. “People don’t like ambiguity. They want to know what their expectations are; they want to know what they can do to succeed.”

Roberson pointed to the popular idiom from professor and social worker Brené Brown: Clear is kind. Clear explanations, directions, and expectations are necessary for individuals to be able to engage with changes to workplace culture.

Analyze your own culture

Effective culture is intentional. Fleet management should have an intimate knowledge of its workplace culture to be able to improve it.

Culture "does have to be managed. It’s something that develops whether you manage it or not,” Roberson said. “It works best when it’s intentional.”

Great safety culture requires fleets to analyze their own culture: Where is it now? Where should it be? Where does the difference between those points lie?

“Yes, of course, safety is paramount. But it’s a part of the pie. It’s something that we can address—safety along with everything else—by starting from ‘why,’ starting from the beginning, doing these analyses of our cultures

“Ultimately, we can make this industry better together by being more than survey data that doesn’t get used and more than giving away nice backpacks one week in September.”