If you’re in a fleet management or health and safety management role there may be occasions when you need to persuade senior managers and drivers alike to raise the priority level of fleet safety and driving standards. Improving your influencing skills can help you do that. Here are a few tips:
- Work out what makes your management team sit up and take notice. Of course finance is going to be important but maybe meeting the organisations duty of care is a bigger deal for senior managers than you realise.
- Different people need a different message. If your approach doesn’t work the first time around, don’t get discouraged, adjust it and keep trying.
- Consultation is key. If people don’t think it’s relevant they won’t do it. So discuss different fleet risk management options, decide what should work and then decide what needs to be measured. Don’t forget, what gets measured gets done’.
- Your colleagues can be positively influenced by rewarding them for good driving performance. There are a wide range of indicators you can use to develop a reward and recognition system.
- Benchmarking your vehicle collision statistics against similar organisations is always a useful talking point. This is especially the case if you can find out what risk fleet management steps the better forming organisations have taken.
- Tell your colleagues what your expected driver standards look like in practical concise terms. For example, this could include how you expect fatigue management to take place in respect of journey planning or how you expect drivers to manage distraction.
These are just a few examples of how colleagues can be influenced to improve fleet risk management. If you have any fleet risk management issues you want to discuss, please get in touch with me at [email protected]
