6 Tips To Reduce Fleet Liability

What was once reserved for huge corporations with hundreds of business vehicles, fleet management has become a trend in businesses of all types and sizes. This even includes local water damage restoration businesses, which require vans to transport bulky cleaning equipment, to national delivery brands with hundreds of trucks. 

Numerous elements are involved in managing a fleet. One such element is fleet liability and risk management. Your business depends on your vehicles and drivers performing their duties efficiently and safely. However, maintaining a higher level of performance while ensuring safety and reducing liability is easier said than done. Unfortunately, legal issues can arise anytime, and without proper risk mitigation, you may leave your fleet and business more vulnerable to costly claims. 

The good news is that there are several ways to lower your risk of costly liabilities. This article shares everything you need to know about fleet management, common fleet risks that may occur, and valuable tips to help reduce fleet liability exposure. 

What Exactly Is A Fleet?

Most people immediately think of hundreds of large trucks and cargo when talking about fleets. However, a fleet also applies to a group of other types of vehicles, including:

• Scooters
• Bicycles
• Motorcycles
• Vans
• Trucks
• Heavy equipment like tractors, backhoes, and bulldozers

In short, a fleet consists of two or more motorized, rolling, or moving vehicles that your business uses to ensure efficient operation. 

Understanding Fleet Risk Management

At its core, fleet risk management refers to a collection of processes and strategies involved in running a safe fleet. It’s a fundamental element of effective fleet management while crossing into a company’s health and safety workplace domain. That said, fleet risk and liability management work to protect your business’ three Ps—property, people, and profit. 

Whether you have less than a dozen of vans on the road or hundreds of drivers working at any one time, you don’t just focus on running an efficient fleet. You also need to ensure that those drivers, vehicles, cargo, and other road users around them are secure and safe.

While fleet risk and liability management cover several areas, they are categorized into three core aspects:

• Minimize or eliminate incidents and adverse effects
• Meeting compliance and regulatory needs
• Ensuring company reputation

3 Components Of Effective Fleet Risk And Liability Management

1. Driver Safety

One of the most significant liability risks of any fleet is driver performance. Driver safety covers safe driving practices and ensuring driver safety, ultimately lowering accidents and liabilities. It also focuses on and targets limited fleet management resources, where needed, to ensure fleet driver safety. 

2. Fleet Maintenance

Maintenance is a critical aspect of fleet efficiency and driver safety. Effective fleet maintenance allows you to monitor and maintain vehicles, improving fleet operations and reducing safety risks. 

3. Compliance

Businesses need to run a compliant fleet. You must keep up with the rules governing commercial fleet operations and traffic regulations, along with compliance for any necessary paperwork. Depending on the type of business you have, fleet compliance may differ slightly. For instance, a delivery business may have different state and federal carrier compliance requirements than small businesses that use a smaller fleet to transport heavy equipment. 

Fleet Liability: Potential Risks You May Face

As businesses use fleets as part of their operations and in providing effective services and goods to consumers, they’re also subject to potential threats and risks, including:

• Accident liabilities
• Asset damage or loss
• Regulatory and compliance fines
• Lawsuits
• Injury and even fatality

6 Strategies To Reduce Fleet Liability

The risks mentioned above can potentially damage your business’s bottom line and reputation. You must have a strategic plan to help reduce fleet liability. Discussed below are five of the best practices to implement:

1. Set Goals

Understanding what you want to accomplish is critical to guiding any decisions you make. As such, establishing fleet risk and liability management goals and monitoring your progress against them can help determine the effectiveness of your strategies and efforts. 

Generally, these goals should be well-defined and communicated throughout your company. Furthermore, striving for a standard set of objectives can unify your team and ensure the success of your efforts. 

Please note that your fleet risk management goals can be set for any metric as long as it’s measurable and achievable. Here are some common goals to reduce fleet liability:

• Lowering safety risks and incidents
• Improving overall vehicle utilization
• Automating compliance and regulatory measures
• Optimizing driver performance

2. Develop A Policy

Once you have a set of goals, you should develop a comprehensive policy. A fleet risk and liability management policy and guidelines can help you implement and achieve your goals and objectives. 

Generally, you want to develop a company policy for risk and liability management, including hiring drivers and training programs, transport compliance, and vehicle procurement and maintenance.

Once you’re finished creating these policies, share and communicate these protocols to the relevant members of your team. You want your staff—from top to bottom—to fully understand and agree with these policies, ensuring smoother team coordination. 

3. Leverage Technology

In terms of doing business, technology helps streamline operations and improve productivity. In the case of reducing fleet liability and risk, technology has offered robust fleet tracking and management software equipped with the necessary features and tools to automate most processes and tasks in running a safer fleet. 

Today’s fleet management system allows you to collect and assess a range of complex data sets and transform them into easy-to-read information. More importantly, most systems come with valuable tools such as vehicle tracking and maintenance scheduling, automated alerts and notifications for compliance submission or vehicle maintenance, geolocation, and monitoring of risky or unsafe driver behaviors. 

With the right technology, you can help minimize a fleet manager’s workload while ensuring efficient liability management to keep your fleet risk-free. 

4. Hire A Dedicated Fleet Risk Manager

It can be tempting to add fleet safety management to your duties or simply assign a team member to oversee your fleet liability and risks. Still, if you genuinely want to reduce liability, it makes sense to hire a dedicated manager. Hiring an experienced and skilled fleet risk manager ensures that this part of your fleet management department receives enough attention. 

A reliable manager can help create and implement effective fleet risk and liability policies. They will oversee various tasks, from acquiring and maintaining vehicles to hiring and monitoring driver performance to ensuring that all your fleet processes comply with the law. 

Ideally, you should hire a fleet manager with a background or education in transportation and logistics. They should also be tech-savvy to ensure the efficient use and implementation of fleet-related systems and technology. 

By hiring a dedicated manager, you can ensure that all fleet-related liabilities are appropriately addressed. They also become the go-to individual if potential risks or compliant updates are needed. Hiring a full-time manager is highly recommended depending on your fleet’s size. In contrast, if you have a small business with less than a dozen of business vehicles, you should consider outsourcing or hiring a part-time worker to handle these tasks. 

5.  Stay On Top Of Vehicle Procurement And Maintenance

Preventive vehicle maintenance is crucial in making your fleet safer. It helps minimize driver safety risks when company vehicles are in tip-top shape. Even if you have well-trained and responsible drivers, poor vehicle condition can still compromise their safety and increases the possibility of road accidents. When you proactively maintain your vehicles, you reduce the chance of mechanical failures and other breakdowns, which could result in costly accidents. 

In addition to staying on top of your vehicle’s maintenance, if you’re thinking of expanding your fleet, you want to choose your vehicles carefully. To make this process easier, you can consult a fleet management company to advise you on fleet selection. They can help you select suitable vehicles with high safety ratings, safety technology, and other critical features, making your fleet safer and remaining compliant.  

6. Improve Safety Awareness

Businesses have no control over road mishaps. However, you have a certain degree of control over keeping your drivers focused on avoiding these accidents. 

A proactive stance in enhancing fleet safety awareness is critical to minimize accidents. What better way to create a safety culture in your fleet department than implementing safety programs?

These training programs are designed to help every driver improve their skill, change unsafe driving habits, and increase efficiency and productivity—all of which reduce risk and liability due to accidents. 

Ideally, you must schedule regular training for both recruits and experienced drivers. Regular training can help drivers update their skills and keep up with driving laws. As a bonus, training also enhances satisfaction, making drivers feel more engaged with their roles.  

Takeaway

Fleet safety and risk management may not be the most exciting topic; however, it’s one of the most important things you should focus on. Companies that proactively focus on risk mitigation across their entire fleet can help reduce liability exposure while enjoying several advantages–from cost-saving opportunities and increasing fleet efficiency to improving overall brand reputation and competitiveness.