If your business operates with trucks, vans, and trailers, you need to ensure that they are in excellent working order year-round to ensure the safety of your drivers and other vehicles on the road. It will save you and your business a great deal of money and hassle.
Accidents happen, of course, but there are safety measures that business owners can put in place to ensure that the number of accidents caused by your company is as close to zero as possible. Let’s take a look at four top safety tips for truck business owners:
Invest in Quality Equipment
From the moment your business began, you should have been focusing on providing your workforce with the best trucks on the market, with all of them kitted out with the best safety equipment money can buy. This includes a First Aid kit (and a defibrillator, where possible), warning flags and signs, safety wear including a visibility jacket, helmet, and gloves, and a torch. If your workforce are carrying defibrillators on their trucks, it might be worth investing in AED management for compliance and maintenance of these medical devices. That will ensure that they are functioning properly at all times and that workers have access to replacement equipment. That might be worth doing. If these items are on board every truck, your drivers can react quickly and confidently to anything that happens when they’re on the road.
Inspect Your Vehicle’s Year Round
In order to ensure the safety of your drivers, all your vehicles should be inspected on a regular basis throughout the year. Furthermore, health checks should take place from top to bottom to ensure that any small issues can be eradicated before they become a bigger issue, and any larger issues can be dealt with before they go out on the road. Every truck should have a detailed report that is updated every inspection, meaning that you can monitor their progress and health at all times.
Protect Your Wheels
The wheels and tires of your vehicles are the areas that can sometimes cause problems without any warning, and without it being anybody’s fault. However, to protect yourself against these issues the best you can, keep your tire pressure topped up and consider fitting your wheels with the safest wheel nut indicator in the world. These incredible tools will inform you of any issues you are having with your wheel nuts before any further damage occurs and could save you a great deal of money and trouble down the line. It could prevent you losing a wheel on the open road, which can be highly dangerous for everyone on the road if it were to happen.
Invest in Staff Safety Training
Every business needs effective safety training, but it’s even more important when you are putting people’s lives at risk on the road each time you take your trucks out. One way to protect yourself beyond the vehicle is to invest in a steady routine of staff training about road safety and what issues with the truck to look out for, including vibrations that don’t feel right, noises from areas of the truck that could indicate some damage, etc.
One way to protect yourself beyond the vehicle is to invest in a steady routine of staff training about road safety and what issues with the truck to look out for, including vibrations that don’t feel right, noises from areas of the truck that could indicate some damage, etc. Many DOT compliance services also provide basic safety plans that fleets can follow.
Regarding staff training, the important aspects of safety within the vehicle include keeping at the appropriate speeds, following GPS commands safely and in good time, stopping distances for braking, and how much space you should be keeping between your truck and the vehicles in front of you. If these areas can become second nature to your employees, you should eradicate the risk of paying out for accidents and repairing trucks that have been damaged to your drivers not obeying the rules of the road properly.
