Every organisation has a safety culture, but is it applied consistently or when a workplace is out of site it is out of mind. The moment a worker crosses the invisible line from a physical environment such as an office or factory to say the road the approach to safety changes. Next week NSW is holding a panel session with two business leaders whose entire focus is providing a safe work environment for their workers on the road. The statistics below clearly illustrate the risk. The opportunity as this webpanel will demonstrate is the organisation can play a huge role in influencing its workers when out on the road.

  • In NSW, almost 30% of workplace fatalities are a result of a road crash at work
  • Approximately 25% of the NSW road toll is fatalities from crashes involving a vehicle being used for business. The majority of these involve a car or light truck
  • The most at risk age group for work related motor accidents is the 45-54 year group (demographics with families, prime of working life etc)

What is your organisations workplace road safety culture? How are you engaging your workers?

We invite you to submit any questions you may have for the panellists in the comments section below.

  1. Frank says:

    Was there a key moment that resulted in you focusing on improving your road safety focus?

    What were the key factors to create your positive road safety culture?

    How did you get buy-in from the senior leadership?

  2. Darren Baker says:

    Is there any evidence that companies that have total mobile phone bans when driving (engine on; phone off) has a positive impact on road safety?

    • jeromecarslake says:

      Hi Darren,

      Once we are at Monash formerly I will find out for you and circle back. Sorry for the delay.

      What we have seen is it is very complicated. A ban can be introduced but unless there is proper engagement with workers and they call for it may fail. People need to understand the risk, buy into it and then introduce their management systems. Nestle is a great example if you look at their webinar. Research in SA on apps and monitoring when a ban was introduced saw use shift outside the workplace hours and become part of the commute thus just shifting the risk. Others who use blockers have found drivers bringing second mobiles, similarly working to get around the risk because they do not understand it.

      check out SUMV as some resources we developed there.

      cheers

      Jerome

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