Tag Archive for: online safety training

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How to Plan for Driver Health During the Hot Summer Months

How to Plan for Driver Health During the Hot Summer Months

How to Plan for Driver Health During the Hot Summer Months

Summer is almost upon us, and with it comes an extra layer of safety precautions to promote good summer driver health. As with any season, summer presents a new set of challenges to overcome as drivers navigate different climates, temperatures, and conditions in different parts of the country.

What are the potential health hazards for drivers during the summer?

While the summer seems like it should be slow and easy, it’s anything but. While you don’t have to worry about blizzards or severe weather in most cases, you need to be aware of an increase in traffic and construction, as well as the toll that heat and sun can take on a trucker’s body.

Why Health and Safety are Important During the Summer

There are a lot of factors that can put truck drivers’ health at risk, especially during long hauls. While the summer is a slower season for other industries, it means more traffic, more slow-downs, and more health hazards for truck drivers. 

The summer sun can present a nice, warm change from winter months, but can also present real risks to driver health when not addressed properly. The sun can cause a glare and impact vision long term, so it’s important that drivers protect their eyes. It can also cause painful sunburns, which can lead to health problems later in life if the skin is not protected.

When driving in the summer months, keep the “Five Ps” top of mind to ensure summer driver health and safety for the long haul and the long term.

Prepare for Traffic Congestion

Summer is the season for tourists, so expect traffic congestion on major roadways. This can lead to quite a bit of anxiety on the part of car drivers and truckers alike and can lead to poor decision making.

Be sure to leave early and account for slow-downs on your route, to ensure timely deliveries without pushing it on the road. Safety is an absolute imperative, so be safe by checking for traffic delays and road conditions before planning your trip.

Protect Your Eyes

Summer driver health is all about protecting your body from the risks of bright suns and heat. During the summer, the sun is especially bright, so high-quality, polarized sunglasses are essential for driving during the day.

Additionally, early morning and mid-evening sun can cause a glare, which can be dangerous to drivers, especially with more cars on the road. Take extra time to absorb surroundings and check glare spots for cars you may have missed.

Protect Your Skin

We’ve all heard of “trucker arm.” This happens when truck drivers rest their arms out the window of their truck, getting a sunburn. Days upon days of this and truckers can experience painful blistering and permanent skin damage. 

Use sunscreen to protect the skin, and roll up windows occasionally to give skin a break from UV rays.

Protect Your Truck

The summer heat puts an extra burden on a truck. It’s important during the summer to check fluids, especially coolant, during summer hauls.

When you’re driving in a hotter, drier climate, the weather can take a larger toll on a truck and even cause major issues if not addressed. Preventable maintenance is especially important during summer months when trucks are exposed to heat and elements at more extreme levels.

Pay Attention to Your Body

It’s easy to ignore the signs of dehydration. At least 518,000 people end up hospitalized each year in the U.S. due to dehydration. During an extended period outside, you may start to feel fatigued or disoriented.

This is your body telling you to cool down and hydrate. Make sure you take regular breaks and drink at least 8 glasses of water every day. Dehydration can lead to detrimental health effects and can even land you in the hospital, so make a plan to drink enough water. 

Another good idea is to carry electrolyte pouches with you at all times. These are small, easy packaged powders that can be added to bottled water to give you an instant boost. 

In addition to hydration, make sure to eat healthy food to fuel your body during the hot summer months. While we typically think of the winter as a season for sickness, the summer can present its own health challenges when you’re not properly nourished.

Key Takeaways about Summer Driver Health:

  • Summertime presents a new set of challenges for truck drivers
  • Protect yourself and your truck from breaking down by establishing a preventable maintenance routine during the summer.
  • Use the “5 Ps” to ensure summer driver health.

Infinit-I Workforce Solutions has a library of 1,000+ training videos on important health and safety topics, including protecting drivers during the summer months. Our videos use microlearning strategies that break the material down into bite-sized chunks, making it easier for drivers to comprehend and retain the information.

For more information on the online training videos available, request a catalog.

Other great posts about summer driver health:
Driver safety tips for the summer
HOT HOT HOT! Sunshine Threatens Truckers
8 Tips for Improving Fuel Efficiency

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How Automatic Reporting Can Reduce the Risk of Poor CSA Scores

Three red semi trucks parked next to each other | improve CSA scores

If you’ve been in the trucking industry long, you know all about poor CSA scores, and you’ve heard the dreaded words. The words you hear after something terrible happens. The words uttered again and again inside courtrooms. The words that can mean the difference between walking away and paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to a plaintiff:

“Prove it.”

If you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen.

In this day and age, trucking companies must have clear and accessible documentation for every log, every training hour, and every incident to keep CSA scores low. Because poor CSA scores might clench the deal in the courtroom.

And, if a trucking company can’t provide irrefutable documentation when the time comes, then legally, it didn’t happen.

What is a CSA score?  And how can a poor CSA score affect me?

CSA stands for Compliance, Safety, and Accountability, and is a reflection on both drivers and trucking companies. CSA scores reflect driver behavior on the road and cover everything from problems with tires to speeding tickets to wrecks. Poor CSA scores can cause major negative effects for your company.

Keeping CSA scores low helps your company mitigate soaring insurance premiums and gives you a leg to stand on in court.

A poor CSA score says to clients, insurance companies, and plaintiffs that a driver and his or her company doesn’t have a strong culture of safety.

Your CSA score can impact not only insurance premiums but can also play a big part in getting and retaining clients. Shipping companies and other prospects want to know that a company will transport their goods safely and efficiently, as they are also held responsible in the event of an accident.

How can I improve my poor CSA scores?

Our online, mobile-friendly training tool equips drivers with the safety knowledge they need to keep CSA scores low and keep your business on the road. Safety training can be completed quickly and easily while your driver isn’t actively driving the truck, such as during loading and unloading, and the results are stored and available immediately.

Instant, cloud-based documentation at your fingertips

Our online training tool does the documentation for you and keeps it stored safely in the cloud, with easy access whenever you need it. 

Check out our whitepaper for more information on maintaining your safety culture and keeping CSA scores low.

So, whenever you’re told to “prove it,” you can.

Key Takeaways to Improve Poor CSA Scores:

  • • Keep CSA scores low with ongoing, easily accessible training 
  • • Document your training records in the cloud, for consistent and accessible documentation any time you need it
  • • Download our guide for more on creating, building and maintaining your safety culture, to keep CSA scores low, and help decrease business risks

View our clients CSA score improvements

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Three Tips to Better Manage Accident Risk for Your Transportation Firm

A close-up of a driver holding a steering wheel | manage accident risk

In May 2019, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published its 2017 Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts. And let’s just say: sometimes facts are scarier than fiction. So, how can you manage accident risk for your transportation firm?

According to FMCSA, there was a 9-percent increase in fatal accidents involving trucks or buses between 2016 and 2017, and there was a 4-percent increase in crashes resulting in injury. Total, that’s over 120,000 crashes involving trucks or buses in one year. And with over 1,500 clients with 300,000 drivers collectively, we aim to help you manage your firm’s accident risk and protect your human resources. 

After the Accident

Those 120,000 crashes resulted in even more people and families whose lives were affected, and many resulted in lawsuits. Additionally, valuable time was lost, and delivery schedules were delayed, costing shipping, receiving, and trucking companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. And ultimately, many trucking companies were assigned a DOT Compliance Review.

What is a DOT Compliance Review?

Similar to a safety audit, a DOT Compliance Review is an onsite examination by the FMCSA.  Major accidents, poor CSA scores, complaints, and violations can trigger a DOT Compliance Review. 

DOT Compliance Reviews will examine records closely, so it is imperative to have reliable, date-stamped, cloud-based storage for all your driver training records.

Before the Accident

What if those accidents could have been avoided? How many lives could we save, and how many hours could we get back if we could prevent accidents instead of solving “after?” As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

What would it take to prevent accidents? We’ve compiled a list of our top three tips for managing your transportation company’s accident risks.

  1. Maintain and deploy your company’s policies and procedures on a regular basis. The best policies and procedures don’t mean anything if not used effectively. In a DOT Compliance Review, your policies and procedures will be requested, and you open your company up to serious compliance risk if they aren’t followed. How do you effectively deploy policies and procedures to your workforce? There’s an app for that.
  2. Hire and retain the best drivers. The trucking industry has a high turnover rate, and transportation companies need to stay competitive in today’s market to retain great drivers. Recognition, engagement and ongoing, user-friendly training help keep your drivers on the road and delivering their best results.
  3. Use Infiniti-I Workforce Solutions’ online safety training. Most of your drivers have base-level safety knowledge. Still, Infinity-I Workforce Solutions goes above and beyond with great safety training modules that are quick, easily digestible, and mobile-friendly, to ensure that every driver in your fleet has high-quality training they can easily access and use.

In today’s high-risk, high-turnover environment, you must provide safety training. We can help customize your training plans to avoid the dreaded DOT Compliance Review and other associated risks of the road. Contact one of our experts today, and together we can build the plan that’s right for your business needs.

Key Takeaways for managing accident risk:

  • • Accidents are more frequent than ever before, and trucking companies must mitigate their accident risk to keep their companies profitable and keep drivers safe.
  • • Hiring and retaining the best drivers make a huge difference to a company’s risk profile.
  • • High-quality training and updates on policies and procedures are a must in today’s high-risk environment. Infiniti-I Workforce Solutions can work with you to customize your driver training tools—keeping safety standards high and costs low. 
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