Stepping Up Your Game with Health & Safety

Working on improving your workplace health and safety? Alsco is.

Alsco NZ provides fully managed rental services in uniforms, linen, floorcare, washroom services, first aid systems and business consumables and they are undertaking a major H&S initiative using Teletrac Navman’s GPS vehicle tracking software. Alsco’s total fleet across New Zealand is over 260 vehicles, ranging from small cars used by sales executives to large trucks carrying long-haul stock.

Taking control

Alsco’s initial need for a GPS vehicle tracking system was focussed around cost savings, monitoring idling and reducing fuel costs. But now the company is rolling out a major health and safety project across their workforce and their fleet.

Alsco has developed a set of KPIs on safe driving behaviour and is using Teletrac Navman’s DIRECTOR software to monitor and report on this. The new KPIs were adopted last year and there is a trial period of 12 months. Alsco is currently monitoring on a daily, weekly and monthly basis for:

• Speed
• Harsh acceleration and harsh braking
• Harsh cornering
• Idling times

“We have an obligation to make sure our people are safe. Not just, ‘here’s a vehicle, off you go.’ It’s about making sure that our people are safe on the roads. We also make sure that our employees understand their responsibilities under the health and safety legislation” says Glen Carmichael, Service Manager, Alsco NZ.

“We’ve had a massive reduction in speeding from November until now. Speeding is trending down substantially. The Teletrac Navman system has now expanded what we can monitor, and this is making a real difference for us.”

Since the new H&S legislation came into force in 2016, Alsco has worked on slowly changing their drivers’ behaviour. The company has gradually implemented additional monitoring of drivers and has worked continuously with the drivers themselves to start reducing their speed before implementing the KPI’s.

Bringing it home

An essential part of Alsco’s H&S initiative is having weekly staff meetings, and going over the driving trends and behaviours. Alsco makes use of the Dashboard in DIRECTOR to see all the trends. They also use the Driver Scorecard, where drivers start with 100 points and can then lose points for speeding, harsh braking etc.

“It’s all about gradual behaviour change – we’re not about the big stick, we’re about a process of education and changing behaviour” says Glen.

DIRECTOR enables Alsco to spot trends on a weekly or monthly basis.

“We’ve found the Dashboard and the Scorecard to be great visual measures for communicating with our staff about changing their driving behaviour,” says Glen. “As driving behaviours change, we will fine tune the KPIs. We already offer incentives to our drivers for good driving behaviours. For example, if they achieve their KPIs for 3 months consecutively, there is a financial reward.”

Glen says that the next step is to run the H&S initiative for 12 months, and over time start reducing targets, so eventually the speeding will come down further, and idling and harsh breaking will be reduced.

Alsco has all the tools at the ready as they step up their game and implement their H&S initiative. They’re taking control of their raw data at hand and bringing it home, using it in a way that is beneficial to their staff and their company. 

To learn more about driver safety download our eBook on Health & Safety