Chris Atkinson
Monday, November 7, 2016
There are many ways that Safety Scores can come back and bite you: insurance rates, intervention at the scales, facility or focused audits, court actions and perhaps the costliest of all – The best drivers don’t want to drive for your company.
Let’s talk just talk about two of those, for now, the ones we think matter most – Insurance rates and drivers not wanting to work for your company. We always try and put drivers first, so let’s start there.
Driver Retention
The more sophisticated drivers have much more knowledge today than in the past. They know about safety scores and how your scores can affect them. For the driver, a bad CSA/SMS rating can mean increased inspections at the scale and certainly less tolerance from officers. Everyone can make an honest mistake. So why would the real professional drivers want to work for a company that is going to get more scrutiny while driving on the roads and highways? It also begs the question – When it comes to dispatch, are the drivers being pushed to do things they should not, thereby pushing the scores higher? What does it say about the controls within the company overall? What is it telling prospective new hires about the core beliefs and values within in the organization?
Don’t be fooled. The efficient and professional drivers know how to get your safety scores, read and interpret them. They can make a pretty good judgment about the company before they sign on. High safety scores can hurt in in the hiring process.
Insurance Rates
Yes, greater than average safety scores will raise your rates. The insurance company has professional staff members that can read and know how the scores will affect court settlements. The insurance industry views consistently higher scores as a disease within the management. The belief is that the management lacks the conviction and control to lower the safety scores. This lack of control, in the eyes of the insurance industry, says a lot about the attitude towards safety and driver management. They also know that the best drivers will not be applying for work at a company with high scores, so they factor that into the rates as well.
There you have it. Two ways that high safety Scores will hurt your company’s bottom line and affect the amount of freight you can move. Leave us a comment below.
