You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

You don’t know what you don’t know is a phrase that gets bounded around a lot in the public sector and indeed the business world.

Its resonated loud and clear this week with us. We’ve been making calls to prospective clients about the services we offer including our on-line driver training courses and the work we do around Driver Risk Safety Policies.

Frighteningly several of the businesses we spoke to were blissfully unaware that if their staff drive as part of their role, employers have a responsibility for their safety, even if they’re driving their own vehicles.

If an employee driving for the purposes of work, makes a bad decision, say they choose to drive with bald tyres and that causes an accident, the buck won’t necessarily stop with the driver. 

Did you as an employer provide as much training as you could to make sure your staff knew and understood why it’s so important to keep their vehicles roadworthy and what else they could do to keep within the law and drive safely too?

If you have staff that drive long distances for work and are away from home for days at a time – do you have boundaries and regulations in place to help keep them safe on the roads?

If you’ve got a sales manager that covers a large area – they could be driving for miles, be behind the wheel for hours and have late finishes and early starts. They may decide that after a midnight finish, they’ll get up at 4am to beat the traffic, to travel 250 miles home to their family but if they fall asleep behind the wheel – that could be potentially fatal.

Courier drivers or those in the home delivery sector typically have tight schedules, are any of your practices putting staff at risk?  If they do, you are breaking health and safety law?

That’s where a Driver Risk Safety Policy comes in. It sets out the rules and regulations the company has in place and articulates the company’s expected standards. In that document it would outline what rest time they expect a staff member to have between business trips before they put the keys in the ignition.

Only last year one company was fined £750,000 after two of their staff died in an accident, where it was found they weren’t sufficiently rested. (https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/company-fined-750k-after-two-18248117)

Cars, lorries and vans can be lethal weapons – you don’t know, what you don’t know wouldn’t stand up in court if you find yourselves prosecuted under health and safety law.

Employers have a duty of care to protect their staff on the roads if they drive for work purposes. That means making sure staff get the right training and ensuring the right policies are in place.

If you’d like to know more about keeping staff safe on the roads, protecting you and your business, we can definitely help you with that.