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Motor vehicle accidents can result in serious injury or death to employees, creating costly insurance claims for companies in the green industry. It is critical to train crew leaders and other workers who regularly drive trucks, vans, and truck-trailer combinations. Hemlock Landscapes, Inc., in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, has found that motivating such drivers to truly “take ownership” of this safety issue profoundly affects its motor vehicle accident rate.

“We decided on two major safety issues early last winter –– to have no lost time accidents and no driving accidents for the 2005 calendar year,” Hemlock’s Jimmy Leffler says. “To date (through late November of 2005), we have not had a single driving accident at all.”

Hemlock Landscapes, which employs an average of 30 to 35 people, is located about 20 minutes east of Cleveland in an area where crews regularly travel on both busy city streets and country roads.

“We had construction occuring from March through November on the main operating road in the middle of our town,” Leffler says. Besides the need to pay close attention to the construction itself, “the timing of all of the [traffic] lights in town have changed” due to the construction.  

Training

When the company hired its first new crew leaders in early 2005, it put them through a comprehensive orientation that included a “hands-on” truck and trailer driving course. It then reinforced the importance of safe driving for all employees by orienting most of the company’s weekly “tailgate” safety meetings toward safe driving issues.

“For example, we discussed watching for pedestrians crossing behind cars, knowing basic traffic laws, paying attention to flaggers, and knowing proper braking distances,” Leffler says. 

At the same time, the company emphasized the importance of reporting“close calls, whether motor vehicle-related or related to any other safety issue. “We stressed this very early in the year,” Leffler says. “We said, ‘You are not going to be punished if you report a close call.’ We began documenting them so we could bring up these points at our safety training meetings. It gave us a chance to look more in depth at our training.”

Ownership by Crew Leaders

All of these actions resulted in Hemlock Landscapes’ crew leaders truly taking ownership of the safe driving issue. They and other crew members regularly reported near-accidents and close calls, such as drivers who were distracted by talking on cell phones or were unprepared for the change in the timing of the town’s traffic lights.

“The staff did a good job of reporting and of watching other people,” Leffler says. “The fact that we didn’t have a single driving accident is definitely attributed to our crew leaders –– they took this upon themselves.”

This issue has been especially important to the company, he adds, because “driving is the single most dangerous task we perform, and we do an awful lot of it.” 

1/06

By Barbara Mulhern, PLANET Safety Specialist