10 Practices To Be Followed By Shipping Companies To Ensure Personnel Safety

As industries continue to become more volatile every day, the challenge of ensuring the safety of the assets, personnel, and business model also becomes increasingly strenuous.

What Is The Importance Of Safety In Shipping Companies?

Safety is the confidence of being shielded from both external as well as internal harms in any place and at all times. Companies all over the globe, including shipping companies, make this their first priority because:

• Safety affects their revenue generation.
• Greater safety attracts more customers and clientele.
• Lack of safety adversely affects their public relations.

Did you know that as per the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there was an eight percent increase in fatal crashes of large trucks and buses from 2016 to 2017 in the United States alone?

Driving a truck continuously for long hours takes a toll on the driver. When en route, maintaining a high degree of spatial and situational awareness is vital, but the human body can be easily subjected to fatigue. Under such circumstances, even the slights of mistake while driving or even a distraction from the road for a second can lead to fatal road accidents.

Such factors have led to the rapid innovations in science and technology to come up with processes, methodologies, and products that can be employed in numerous ways in a shipping company to concretize their safety standard goals.

Ways To Ensure A High Degree Of Safety

Now that you are aware of what safety is and why it is so crucial for shipping companies, let us look at some ways that make shipping companies a safer place for the personnel they employ.

1. Driver Training

Although safety and accidents on the road are influenced by a plethora of factors, it is undeniable that the greatest degree of control over road safety of a truck is in the hands of the person behind the wheel. Hence, training the driver is the most crucial aspect of ensuring the best road safety.

Moreover, training the drivers to tackle harsh driving incidents is better than the company stepping in after the accident has happened. This is a classic example of the popular phrase “prevention is better than cure.”

Thanks to the internet and devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets, your drivers can be trained comfortably even while they are on duty.

For example, Samsara’s complete video-based driver safety program uses advanced driver cams with embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) to encourage safe driving practices, eliminate risks, and improve return on investment (ROI).

2. Generate Fleet Tracking Reports

Contrary to popular belief, the best way to achieve the desired outputs or results is not by punishing the undesirable return but by rewarding the appropriate outcomes.

Hence, a great way to promote healthy driver competition for more efficient performance and safer operations is by incentivizing safety. This is where fleet tracking reports come into play. Fleet tracking reports help to monitor driver behaviors and empower the fleet managers or owner-operators to reward the truck drivers who are performing the best with bonuses, vouchers, and more.

The results of this are more fuel-efficient driving patterns and efficient performance of the entire operations division of the shipping company, all without compromising the safety of the personnel.

3. Usage of Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs)

Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) are devices that monitor the diagnostic information of a vehicle by easily plugging into the onboard diagnostic (OBD) port of the vehicle.

The help in determining any faults that may exist in the truck to mitigate road accidents and ensure worker safety to the standards of Samsara safety.

4. Invest In Asset Trackers

Many small shipping companies make the mistake of not investing in asset trackers and end up losing thousands of dollars annually.

A premium quality asset tracker will help you locate remote assets, detect and recover stolen equipment, improve revenue. Hence, the companies’ workers will be safe from any lawsuits that might arise due to missing goods.

5. Set Up Geofences

GPS fleet tracking equipment can help you set up geofences in addition to empowering you with the ability to track your cargo and your driver in real-time with a helicopter view.

A geofence is essentially a virtual border or boundary that you, as a fleet manager, can set up to prevent the drivers from changing course or to get notified when an unauthorized movement of cargo takes place.

6. Provide Adequate Sanitation And Sanitary Resources

Making sanitary resources available has become a crucial step in 2020 to ensure the safety of workers in the workplace. Sanitizer dispensers and paper towels should be accessible to everyone.

7. Perform Meticulous Preventive Maintenance Checks

Preventive maintenance checks and services are a vital part of road safety. If not done properly, there could be a failure of a truck component en route that can cause a great degree of damage to both lives as well as property.

Hence, performing preventive maintenance checks meticulously is one of the top priorities for a logistics company.

8. Careful Loading And Unloading Of Hazardous Cargo

The drivers should be made aware of and taught to handle hazardous cargo like fuel, chemicals, and more. Without proper training and awareness, the possibility of damaging the cargo increases, which can prove to be tremendously chaotic and can even result in explosions of loss of lives.

9. Complying With Hours Of Service (HoS) Regulations

By staying compliant with the Hours of Service (HoS) regulations, the fatigue of the drivers driving the truck will be largely lowered. Hence, transportation becomes safer.

10. Regular Meetings

By conducting regular meetings and discussion sessions, people from various divisions of the company can come under one roof to discuss creative and effective ways that help to improve the safety of the workers and the workplace.

Conclusion

While transportation keeps getting faster, the roads are also getting more crowded each year, thus increasing the likelihood of fatal vehicle crashes. Hence, companies from numerous industries all over the globe are investing large sums of money every year to ensure the safety of their personnel during work. This has led to a lot of useful innovations and brought about many changes in the laws and regulations that help to enforce road safety protocols.

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