Know the Risks Involved in Your Employee's Driving on Your Time

Driving at work involves certain risks for the employee and the company, and it is no longer acceptable for companies to be unaware of these risks.

What is important for you to know?
Often companies are under the false assumption that they are protecting the safety of their employees on the road just by assuring that their employees have a valid driver’s license and that the vehicles in their fleet are properly registered. This is definitely not the case.

What is the current Legislation?
The health on safety of your employees while they are on the job must be ensured by employers in every way practical according to the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974.

Employers are also charged with effectively providing a safe work environment according to the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992, which were amended in 1999. It is important that companies carefully asses the risks faced by employees and others when it comes to health and safety when completing work tasks. Work related driving is a task that should definitely be considered in this assessment. No matter who owns the vehicle, employees who are driving on company business during company time are thought to be completing a work related activity.

The responsibility of the employer to the employee was recently outlined in a series of guidelines published by the Health and Safety Commission. One of their recommendations was that a director be appointed within the company who is responsible for health and safety issues, including safe driving while working. Regular employee commuting is not included in these guidelines.

Why is this issue receiving so much attention?
The government has set clear targets and high standards for reducing road traffic accidents. Those driving on company business have been shown by recent studies to be more likely to be involved in serious accidents involving injury and death than other drivers. This means that work related driving has become the focus of government efforts to reduce these accidents. There is now an attempt to reduce the accident toll by using existing health and safety regulations. Traffic accidents by employees will now mean that companies are investigated by both the police and Heath and Safety.

What should companies do?
Companies need to establish a system of guidelines for safe driving, just as they would any other work related activity. These guidelines should include:

• Top management support for a system of comprehensive road safety policies.
• Risk assessment of both individual drivers and specific driving functions and tasks as part of a complete road safety management policy.
• Complied statistics of road accidents that are used to reduce driving risks.
• Eliminate and reduce driving risks by implementing safe practices for work related driving.
• Company managers who are familiar with policies and willing to stand behind them.
• Drivers for the company need to be given proper training and supervision so that they can maintain safe practices while driving on company business.
• Policies should be monitored for effectiveness and revised when necessary.

Does this include the use of private vehicles?
When it comes to workplace driving safety it does not matter who owns the vehicle. There is the same liability for companies whether the employee is driving a company owned vehicle or their own. Companies can not dismiss their responsibility and liability by having employees drive their own cars as opposed to company cars.

Sometimes privately owned vehicles carry a greater risk. Companies are not able to control the maintenance, equipment, and acceptability of the vehicle prior to having it complete a task.

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