DriverSafe: Employee Skill & Attitude Assessments
SKILL AND RISK-ATTITUDE ASSESSMENTS FOR
Professional Heavy Vehicle Drivers and Operators of Forklifts and Major Plant
Employees and particularly drivers and plant & equipment operators, can make or break your business depending upon their skills and their attitudes towards safety and risk-taking. You need to ensure that your employees have the right skills for the job and safe & responsible attitudes.
Some employees (approx 33%) have higher risk profiles because their particular attitudes lead them to take risks or disregard safety more than others. These higher-risk employees tend to have the vast majority of vehicle accidents (75%) and injuries (85%) and thus can expose your business to substantial costs. Identifying and managing these employees is critical if you are to avoid these costs.
Just 1/3rd of Drivers are High-Risk BUT they have 75% of Accidents + 85% of Injuries.
South Australian Management Support (SAMS) developed DriverSafe® in conjunction with the trucking industry to help companies like yours to improve their safety outcomes by:
Reducing your rates of accidents and injuries and avoiding the major human and financial costs, including lost operational capacity due to vehicle downtime.
Assessing Job Applicants to ensure they have the required skills and responsible attitudes before you employ them.
Identifying any skills and attitude awareness training required to improve existing employees’ risk profiles.
The innovative DriverSafe®, ForkSafe® and OperatorSafe® programs combine:
- Competency-based skill assessments against the national competency standards. These assessments are done by a Registered Training Organisation and individuals who meet the required skill standards receive a National Competency Certificate.
DriverSafe® requires an 85% pass mark whereas the standard Heavy Vehicle License test only requires 55%. So DriverSafe® employees need higher skill levels.
- A very effective assessment of the individual’s attitudes towards safety and risk-taking, using the PAQS Accident Risk Management profiling tool, in the following five key areas that indicate their relative risk of accident or injury:
- Safety Control (how much responsibility they accept for their own safety).
- Risk Taking (the extent to which they take risks compared to others).
- Stress Tolerance
- Driver Attitude (their attitude towards others on the road).
- Quality Orientation (compliance with rules and doing the job properly)
In addition to a risk-rating in each of these five areas, an Overall Safety Index rating is given. Approximately 1/3rd of individuals have an overall high-risk Safety Index rating.
% of Individuals Assessed as High, Medium or Low Risk in Each Area
Our innovative DriverSafe® program and it’s sister programs can, just by doing pre-employment assessments, help you avoid recruiting employees with high risk attitudes that put themselves, other employees, your equipment and your business at risk from major accidents and injuries.
 A high-risk rating in any of the five risk areas listed above indicates the individual requires training in that area to reduce their risk level to acceptable levels. A medium-risk rating indicates the individual could improve their risk rating with training but it is not essential. The competency-based skills assessment will also identify any areas where skill training is required to bring the individual up to the required level for DriverSafe®
The pie-chart diagram indicates that:
30% of pre-employment assessments (red slice) result in the individual not being recommended for a safety-sensitive job such as truck driving or forklift operation, because of their overall high-risk attitudes.
Another 32% (Blue Slice) are recommended because they have an acceptable Overall Safety Index Rating but they are high risk in one or more areas and must have training to reduce their risk.
29% (dark green slice) are recommended with the suggestion that they have some training because they have one or more Medium Risk areas but no high-risk areas.
The final 9% (light green slice) are recommended for safety-sensitive positions without any suggestion of training because they are low-risk in all five areas.
At SAMS we can tailor any of the programs to assess the specific operational skills required by your business in addition to the core mandatory skills in the National Competencies. We recognise that your business is different from others’, with different staff and practices and therefore it has different needs. These unique programs have been developed with this in mind. Naturally a program tailored to your needs will further enhance the benefits to your business. Using DriverSafe® to identify potential “high risk” employees will be just a small financial investment that will serve you well through the years ahead by helping to avoid far greater costs. Avoiding just one accident and/or injury through the use of these programs should be enough incentive for you to call SAMS and discuss how we can make this work for you.
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