Operating over 130 HGVs across Scotland and northern England, safety sits at the heart of everything John Mitchell does.
Angela Martin, a winner of the Transport News ‘Woman of the Year’ award, is responsible for the company’s safety initiatives. She explains that they began using E-Training World’s online driver profiling and e-driver training system following a recommendation by their insurers, QBE.
“The risk solutions team at QBE introduced us to E-Training World’s system and we loved it immediately,” said Angela.
“As a family business, we have a very close relationship with our drivers and have built a very strong culture of safe driving over the years. They were very quick to embrace the system and we began profiling drivers online to pinpoint their risk levels across the four key areas of attitude, knowledge, concentration and observation, and hazard perception.
“We then gave them online driver training which covers areas such as avoiding bridge strikes, use of mobile phones, concentration and observation and also parking and manoeuvring – and we have a choice of 20 modules covering all aspects of driving. What we really like about the system is that the modules are tailored to HGV drivers, which means the training is extremely relevant and gets very good buy in from our drivers.”
Any new driver that joins John Mitchell is required to carry out online driver profiling and e-driver training as part of their induction programme. This is all part of a very proactive process to keep collisions to an absolute minimum and create a culture of safe driving throughout the business.
“Such is the effectiveness of the system that there was a short period when we weren’t using it quite as much and we saw our collisions creep up again,” said Angela. “That proves how important it is to us and is why we offer it as an integral aspect of our safe driving culture, which also extends to other activities as well.
“All vehicles are fitted with telematics and we also communicate constantly with drivers through our transport management system. For example, we will issue weather warnings or push out key road safety messages so that our drivers are being constantly trained as part of a long-term plan to be collision-free and for every driver to be safe and feel valued at work.”