The construction industry is no stranger to safety policies, especially when it comes to fleet management, but many policies can be difficult to read and out of touch with daily processes. To help increase safety in your operation, incorporate employee feedback in your safety policy and ensure your employees have the proper tools and equipment they need. Throughout his jobs in distribution and construction, Brent Godwin—director of inventory maintenance and procurement at Keolis—has done just that.
Digitizing for Simplicity and Safety
During his nearly nine-year stint as fleet operations manager at Builders FirstSource in the 2010s, Godwin managed a complex web of fleet platforms. Afterward, he went on to manage vehicles and equipment for Bighorn Construction and Reclamation for a time, where he sought a more unified system that integrated with the company’s existing telematics provider. “We want[ed] to keep it easy,” he explains. “We [didn’t] want multiple logins for multiple different systems. You shouldn’t have to go here to find your fuel spend, go here to look at your maintenance spend, go here to find your vehicles, you know? It just makes it a lot more cumbersome for [users]. I always try to find some simplicity in things.” A digital fleet optimization platform allowed him to consolidate maintenance records, improving both safety visibility and efficiency.
Along with a team of five technicians, Godwin managed both fleet and equipment for BCR, including trailers, power units and heavy equipment, totaling around 300 assets with an acquisition of roughly 300 more. While he knew that maximizing uptime for these assets was crucial to the company’s productivity, the safety of his team—as well as that of asset operators—always remained a top priority. With the availability of consolidated fleet data recorded in real-time, Godwin could effectively manage fleet safety better than ever.
Monitoring Safety Through Data
Godwin has always been a big proponent of safety in general: “My goal is to make sure that all of our employees go home the same way they come in. But the hard thing with safety is monitoring it,” he says. “The best way I’ve found to do that is to incentivize it.” In a previous position, Godwin found that applying safety score cards proved successful as a way to incentivize safety among his team. “Every month that you had an incident-free month, you got put into drawings, you got gift cards,” he says. “The more you can get people to buy in on things, in my opinion, the better off you are. So it’s not just a big mandate from one person going down to all these people; it’s everybody looking out for everybody’s interest.”
The safety score cards dealt with incident-free driving, including tracking behaviors like speeding, harsh cornering, harsh braking, as well as making sure pre-trip inspections were done daily. “[We just made] sure they’re doing what they were supposed to be doing, and we rewarded them for it,” says Godwin.
At BCR, Godwin leveraged driver behavior, maintenance and other fleet data to help monitor safety practices. One thing he focused on was finding issues when they were small and manageable, before they became full-blown problems. “Whether [it was finding] unsafe stuff with equipment that’s going out [when it’s] not ready to go, [or it’s] not being loaded properly, or it’s not being operated properly—those are huge,” Godwin says. “So I built out dashboards and incentivized safety programs before to promote safe driving, one: It helps out CSA; two: It really allowed us to coach up the poor performers before they got cited for anything. It also allowed us to kind of reward our top drivers, you know, because good drivers are hard to find; they’re even harder to retain.”
Standardizing Expectations Across the Fleet
Because BCR is a nationwide company, Godwin stressed that standardizing safety was a must in keeping equipment and operators safe. “It [was] really taking those enterprise-wide protocols and making sure everybody [was] following it the same across the board, so that if you [got] into any piece of equipment, no matter where you [were], it should be in the exact same condition,” he explains.
As with most fleets, pencil whipping was often a concern when it came to inspections and it was something Godwin saw a good amount of when BCR’s inspections were paper-based. To alleviate those concerns, he required pictures be submitted with inspections for any failed item. He speculates that part of the issue when it comes to pencil-whipping is that drivers may feel they’ll get in trouble for failing an inspection item. “You basically tell these guys, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get in trouble if you fault something out. We want to know so we can get it fixed. It’s not big brother looking at you.’”
Making Safety Policies Usable and Scalable
A safety policy is only effective if people understand it and can act on it. Godwin advocates for simplicity and clarity, saying: “You have to put it in layman’s terms. [At BCR, we didn’t] put safety policies with, you know, Article 693.1. You make it scalable […] make it easy. The way I see it is, I write policy so that I could hand it to my mother and she would understand what I’m saying. And my mother knows nothing about corporate safety. Understand your audience and work towards that audience.” That means avoiding jargon, ensuring materials are bilingual and making sure any required tech is actually accessible to users.
This is where employee feedback really comes into play. Employee feedback was central to Godwin’s approach. Field workers often see problems that leadership misses, and they need to feel safe speaking up about them. Godwin fostered a culture where feedback was not only welcomed but acted upon. “Give the voice to the people is the way I see it, and if you give them the voice, you create a culture of safety,” he says. “Maybe there’s a different type of PPE [you] could be buying. Maybe [you] bought something and [you] got a good deal on it, but it was terrible and didn’t perform well.” Getting employee feedback helped Godwin and BCR ensure they were getting the right safety equipment and tools for employees, as well as implementing safe and productive daily processes.
Adapting to Change
Fleet safety should be something that evolves over time, but there are also unexpected situations that need to be considered, such as weather extremes. That’s why Godwin stayed ready to pivot. “A lot of [BCR’s] operations are in the southern U.S.; [during a very hot summer] we had to enact policies to deliver water to [workers],” he says. “A lot of [BCR’s] sites didn’t have potable water onsite, so we had a guy in a pickup truck driving around all day with a cooler full of ice-cold water.” Godwin says that they made sure employees understand common safety issues relating to climate, including signs of heat exhaustion and hypothermia, which went a long way in keeping them safe in the field.
For Godwin, fleet safety goes beyond compliance checklists or top-down mandates, but rather enables employees to understand potential risks and raise concerns that help keep the whole team safe.
SEE ALSO: IMPROVING DRIVER SAFETY AND FLEET MANAGEMENT WITH VIDEO TECHNOLOGY
