How does your company approach driver safety? If you’re simply using a drivers’ Compliance Safety Accountability performance data and training them to be compliant, that’s not enough.
This was the message Garth Pitzel, Bison Transport’s director of safety and driver development, delivered during a packed educational session on creating safety cultures at the Truckload Carriers Association’s 79th Annual Convention in Nashville, Tenn.
Bison Transport, a Winnipeg, Manitoba-based truckload carrier with 1,900 drivers and 1,400 power units, has a reputation as one of the safest trucking companies in North America. It has earned TCA’s National Fleet Safety Award in the over-100-million-mile category 10 consecutive years and has taken home the Grand Prize National Fleet Safety Award nine times.
But the company’s approach to safety hasn’t always been as concrete as it has in the last decade. In the mid to late 1990s, Bison Transport’s safety culture focused solely on compliance.
With a “high” driver turnover rate of 35 percent to 40 percent during a time the company was expanding at a rate of 100 trucks per year, Pitzel said the company’s on-road safety performance fluctuated wildly. “We’d have a good year when it came to accidents and insurance, then we’d have a bad year, then we’d have a really bad year,” said Pitzel.
By 2001, unpredictable insurance and accident costs year-to-year forced management to take a closer look at its safety efforts. “We knew we had to go from being a compliant company to a safe and compliant company,” said Pitzel. “Just because you’re compliant doesn’t mean you’re safe.”
At the time, Pitzel said Bison Transport invested heavily in the development of its office personnel, but on the drivers’ side, “We gave them all the regulations and a five-day orientation and let them go, and we felt great. Thirty days later we would be re-training them.”
