Extending Driver Risk Management Benefits to ALL Employees and Their Families

Originally published in Fleet Management Weekly 10/7/22

By Ed Dubens, CEO/Founder of eDriving

The benefits of implementing a driver risk management program – reduced collisions, incidents, injuries, license violations, carbon emissions, and reduced overall cost of vehicle ownership – are generally well understood by organizations with employees driving for work purposes. They recognize that a holistic risk management program that helps drivers identify their risky habits and change those with the help of training, coaching, and gamification, provides long-lasting and often life-saving benefits.

So, why limit these life-changing and life-saving benefits solely to those employees driving for work purposes?

Extending your driver risk management program to ALL employees AND their families makes good sense. And cents. Here’s why:

Employee Recruiting & Retention

In this post-COVID world where individual and family priorities have evolved, attracting, and retaining high quality employees is harder than ever; however, organizations can often boost their appeal by offering interesting, unique employee benefits.

Providing ALL employees and their families access to a driver safety/emergency response app that aims to keep them safe while driving AT ANY TIME shows employees and recruits that the organization cares for them and their family members – even outside of work hours. Unlike various benefits that apply to only certain target groups, driving is nearly universal, so ALL can take advantage of the benefit. And, for most employees, driving will be the riskiest activity they undertake every day. So, why not reduce that risk, provide employees peace of mind with emergency support, and help them with potential insurance discounts for safer driving – while generating some corporate goodwill in the process?

ESG Benefits

Corporations are increasingly focused on cleaning up their acts – literally! They are paying more attention to their Environmental, Social and Governance impacts and taking steps to improve their public perception in these areas. Many are focusing on employee health and wellness, providing access to a vast array of resources to boost wellness and stave off health issues. Certainly, a driver safety program that helps ALL employees and their family members trade risky habits for safer ones, and provides life-saving features including automatic crash detection and personal SOS with emergency support services, would show commitment to employees and convey that the corporation “walks the talk”.

Sustainability

Organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate how they are contributing to global environmental goals. Arming EVERY employee with a safe driving app that showed them how eco-friendly their driving is would constitute proactive action on the part of companies. After all, safe driving IS eco-driving! Reducing risky driving behaviors such as harsh acceleration, speeding, and severe braking helps reduce CO2 emissions, and helps companies contribute to global sustainability initiatives and goals.

Company Car & Grey Fleet Considerations

In organizations that supply company cars to employees driving for work purposes, those often come with privileges for family members to drive the vehicles, as well. Those drivers present additional risk, however, which can result in increased insurance rates and higher costs in the long run. Such risks can be partially mitigated by enrolling family drivers in the same safe driving program(s) as those offered to employees. On the flip side, since COVID, the use of grey fleet vehicles – or personal-use vehicles used for work purposes – has been on the rise, presenting equal or even greater source of risk for companies. Changes to insurance and fleet policies must be made to accommodate grey fleet vehicles and the drivers who operate them – including family members. Here again, extending a driver safety program to family members can help mitigate some of this risk.

Introducing Mentor Defender

For 25 years, eDriving has been working with organizations globally, helping them to create crash-free cultures^®, with a primary focus on improving behaviors. Now, we’re expanding our reach with our latest Mentor solution that can be used by employees and family members outside of an enterprise fleet driver safety program. Mentor Defender:

• Allows employee-centric organizations around the world to extend their safety cultures and boost ESG efforts by providing far-reaching safety and health benefits to ALL employees and their families;
• Provides insurers and fleet management companies with a customizable app that they can offer to their customers to help reduce collisions, incidents, injuries, license violations, and CO2 emissions;
• Allows auto safety membership organizations to offer significant value to their members.

For these audiences, Mentor Defender includes a full suite of features including driver scoring, eLearning, coaching, automatic crash detection, Personal SOS, emergency response services, connection to insurance discounts, gamification, Circles location tracking (with permission) of family and friends, and safety tips & 24 x 7 support from Professor Eddie – designed to ensure ALL drivers arrive safely after every trip.

About the author

Ed’s passion is helping companies proactively manage driver risk and prioritize the safety of their employees who drive for work purposes. The ultimate goal of eDriving’s programs is to help drivers return home safely to their loved ones and communities at the end of each day. Ed has been fortunate enough to be living out his passion for over 25 years, impacting lives and helping transform the field of driver risk management along the way.

eDriving’s Mentor program identifies risky driving behaviors for intervention and safe driving habits for recognition. In-app features include micro-training and coaching templates, gamification, collision reporting, vehicle inspections, and an individual FICO^® Safe Driving Score validated to predict the likelihood of being involved in a collision. Mentor’s integrated automatic crash detection and Personal SOS features powered by Sfara and Bosch trigger a voice call and emergency support, as needed, from one of Bosch’s Global Call Centers supporting >50 countries. Through its five-stage, patented Crash-Free Culture^® risk reduction methodology, eDriving helps organizations embrace safety and reduce risk for Sales, Service, Delivery and Warehouse drivers, all within a privacy-first, data-secure environment.

eDriving, a Solera company, is the digital driver risk management partner of choice for many of the world’s largest organizations, supporting over 1.2 million drivers in 125 countries. Over the past 25 years, eDriving’s research-validated programs have been recognized with 120+ awards around the world.

For more info, visit https://www.edriving.com