3 Defensive Driving Courses You Should Teach at Your Safety Meetings

Driving is the riskiest thing your employees do.

Whether they’re making service calls to customer locations, spraying for pests at homes and businesses, or fixing power lines, your employees face the biggest risk of an accident or injury while behind the wheel. That means you face the biggest risk of cost-of-loss while they’re behind the wheel, too. What can you do to ensure your employees prevent accidents while they drive? You can start by investing in defensive driving training.

The Power of Defensive Driving Training

It’s a common misconception that, because your employees have their driver’s license and a pretty good record, you’ve done all you can to help them prevent an accident. According to the CDC, 24% of worker deaths were due to a vehicular collision in 2018. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you invest in defensive driving training, you can protect your employees and reduce your cost-of-loss.

In our experience, companies that invest in professional defensive driving training can reduce their accidents and collisions by 20% or more. By investing in defensive driving training, you will:

• Protect your employees
• Protect the people sharing the road with them
• Reduce workers’ comp claims
• Save money, time, and resources spent on dealing with vehicular accidents

What Defensive Driving Courses Should You Teach?

The best defensive driving courses cover everything from the basics of safety, risk, and defensive driving all the way to the intricacies of merging and changing lanes. Here are three defensive driving topics that are essential for any defensive driving program worth its salt.

1. The Basics of Safety, Risk, and Accidents

Most people don’t see it this way, but if your employees must drive for any part of their job, they are professional drivers. That means they need to understand what safety, risk, and accidents are. Your employees need to know:

• • The definition of safety, risk, and accidents
  • How safety and risk are related
  • What accidents are and why they happen
  • How accidents can be prevented

When everyone is on the same page about these ideas, it will be much easier to work towards preventing accidents.

2. The Basics of Defensive Driving

We learn new information better when it’s put into groups. This is the adult learning theory called chunking. In biology class, you learned about all the different animal classes such as mammals, reptiles, and birds. In English class, you learned about the different types of words and their functions, like nouns and verbs. This made learning the material easier. 

Just like chunking made learning easier in school, it makes it easier for your drivers to learn defensive driving. That’s why you should put essential defensive driving behaviors into categories. We use a simple and elegant system to do so. It’s called LLLC: The Four Principles to Driving Safely. LLLC stands for 

• • Look Ahead
  • Look Around
  • Leave Room
  • Communicate

Every defensive driving behavior fits into one of these four principles. When your drivers start by learning these principles, the rest will come much easier.

3. Safely Navigating Intersections

Once your employees learn the basics of safety, accidents, and defensive driving, it’s time for them to delve into more specific topics. Perhaps no topic is more important to cover than intersections.

Intersections are the riskiest driving environment your employees face. There are pedestrians and cyclists, changing traffic patterns, and vehicles coming from every direction. If your employees learn how to safely navigate intersections, your accident frequency will decrease significantly.

Defensive Driving Training Has Never Been Easier

Between employee scheduling, hiring and firing, and delivering excellent customer service, you have a full plate. How could you find the time to create and run employee defensive driving training? Luckily, defensive driving training is extremely easy to access.

Light duty fleet safety programs such as The Fleet Safety Course offer professionally made videos, quizzes, and online hosting for the most pressing driver safety topics. Your employees can access the best training available from home on any smart device, or you can host training in-person. Best of all, high-quality defensive driving training is cost-effective. That means the return on investment pays for itself and then some.

With cost-effective defensive driving at your fingertips, protecting the lives of your employees has never been easier.