Safety Manager Boot Camp Guest Speaker Chris Kines Director of Safety at Robert Bearden
Transcript:
You recall how long you’ve been using the Infinit-I system? I know it’s through Paladin.
Yeah. So, I personally, I’ve been the safety director for going on my third year now. So, it was implemented long before I took office. But yes, Paladin has been a customer, I would say at least ten years or more. So, it’s used throughout our entire affiliate network, the safety community, gets together every month and decides which safety training videos we’re going to send out to our fleets and then it’s assigned from there.
Who all trains in your company on the system? Is it just drivers or do you have other folks in your company that?
Currently at my company, Robert Bearden, it’s mainly just drivers. We do train our OPS personnel for drug and alcohol awareness. There’s been several custom content that Paladin has created and sent out that enterprise wide to train on, so we’ll do that, but typically on a monthly basis it’s just the drivers.
Jump in if you got a question you’d like to ask, but we just got done talking about safety culture. Do you think this has had a positive impact on culture in your company?
Yeah, absolutely. Jay was just at our safety kickoff meeting back in February, up in Nashville and that’s what they harped on a lot was safety culture. I brought back a lot of things back to my affiliate, but I think it all starts with training, you know it starts with getting the message out and starting that culture from from the ground up, you know because if you don’t. I mean, we play as we train, you know. So, if we don’t have that training for all employees, not just drivers then we’re just kind of shooting in the dark. So, I think it definitely has a huge role in the culture of any company.
It’s hard to have a good safety culture if you’re not compliant, then you’re not doing the training. You know we had that conversation about compliance versus culture. And you know the way I look at it is, is if you have the right safety culture, compliance is given. So that’s kind of how I think about it. So, but I was curious about whether you thought there was an impact.
Beyond just driver safety training, have you used it in orientation?
We do. We still have in person orientation. We usually average around 5:00 to 6:00. Drivers a week is what we like to keep it for in house just for space. But I do run out the gate. I have a custom package that I’ve put together for new hire orientation. So, they get that during our in-person orientation. I give them 30 days to watch the content, it’s uh, it’s mainly just policies and procedures and kind of what we expect as a company.
What about for corrective action?
Yes, I use it. One thing we just recently all the affiliates now have them. We call them event recorders. We don’t call them cameras. It’s part of terminology within our corporation. But event recorders. So, we, you know, we use them, we have an inward facing AI sensor. It catches them sometimes on cell phones. Paladin in general, came out with three strikes. You’re out policy. I didn’t like that. I’m. I’m a little bit more ******** than that, so I give them one time. If I catch you on your cell phone one time, you’re getting a distracted driving corrective action series. I give them one week to get to view that content. If they don’t do the content, or if they’re caught again, then they’re gone. So, and we use them for accidents as well. You know, if we have a backing accident, then I’ll sign backing a big rig safely, I think is what. Yeah. So, we definitely use it for corrective action.
Do you mind sharing your completion percentage?
Right now, we’re at 89%. So yeah, we, we, we aired out all of our, dirty laundry at the safety kickoff meeting. RBI was on the lowest end of safety, completing of all the affiliates. So, we’re looking at ways to beef that up. We currently just started a quarterly safety bonus which completion of the Infinit-I training is tied into that no accidents. They have to drive a certain miles a month, no citations or violations, so it’s all kind of tied into the, you know, monetary incentive for drivers.
Yeah, there’s, you know, we’ll talk about this on tomorrow, but. You can’t make safety training in your company voluntary. It has to be mandated in some way, shape or form. How you go about doing that, I think what Chris is talking about is tying it into some other bonus, whether it’s safety or performance or whatever you want to call it . Makes good sense. I mean, it gets in their pocket. You know, if they don’t do their training, they don’t get their bonus and your good drivers are going to want to do that because they count that as part of their income. So, we’ll talk tomorrow. There are some other ways to mandate that sort of thing too. You can get real ugly about it if you want to call it that. You know, we have a lot of companies that will just withhold dispatch until they get it done.
Yeah. And we do that as well.
Unemployed until they take finish their turn.
If they get uh, if they get 30 days or more behind, then we block from dispatch until they get caught up so.
So you do have that kind of policy. And that really gets operations involved, you know, they really should be the ones driving safety as much as you and the safety department are. And if you can get them, because these companies will just send a report to operations that these drivers are not available for dispatch. And I’ve heard plenty companies say in a very short period of time, all the training gets done. So, there’s different ways you got to do it, but it has to be mandatory, and you know, folks, I had people in this room that have said, well, I couldn’t make that safety clearing mandatory, some of my drivers might quit. My only response is, don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, right?
Forward facing cameras. I’m kind of curious about that because yeah, I probably would have a lot of drivers.
You think so? You might have some but they will come back.
Yeah, and that was something that we ran into before we got them. You know, word was getting out. And so, I’m going to quit if y’all put one in my truck, we’ve had like, 2 drivers to leave us because of cameras, one of which is because I got rid of them because they couldn’t drive afely when something was looking at them. So, Paladin invested just over $3,000,000 for all the affiliates. It’s A 4 camera system, one forward facing inward facing, then two side pads down the side. Last Wednesday night we had a fatality accident up in Tennessee where our driver was completely in the right. The passenger truck come over to his lane, the inward face and showed him seat belted in. You know, 10 and 2, did everything he could do to get off the road to avoid the accident. So that one incident alone probably the ROI on the whole program probably pay for itself for that one incident.
Question. We talked something about custom content. Have you made some custom content?
I personally have not made any custom content, but yes, Paladin makes it quite frequently. They do a lot of PowerPoints and there’s one guy, Eric Hill, that follows from there where he narrates it. So, he’s kind of like the voice of Paladin, so he puts out quite a bit of custom content.
One of the things I always like to ask is, I’m sure you’ve had some connection to our customer service folks or what we call client success, do you deal with them? What’s your impression of those folks?
I do, yes. They’re awesome to work with. They send me a report every month on our overdue videos, so it helps me to stay on top of it, you know. But even before I got really familiar with the system, I’d reach out to Amanda, and she would assign them for me. So never had anything that that I’ve ever asked or needed from from the client relationship that they haven’t been just awesome with us so.
Yeah, they will do exactly what he just said. We have a question to address.
Great.
Yeah. Two questions actually, do you bundle the videos, or you just assign 1 5-7 minute video and how do you pay for it? Is it part of the on-duty schedule?
Yeah. So, first party question we have a monthly assignments. It’s usually about an hour, 45 minutes to an hour worth of content a month. And we usually try to do a third hours first compliance injury and accident prevention and then some, something that’s relative to the I guess the time of the year like we’ve had a lot of winter driving videos this last couple months. And as far as paying the drivers. My drivers, they their mileage based. So, when they’re sitting at a customer or receiver, or something like that. They can watch a video or two before they get loaded or unloaded and do it, so they must be on the on-duty line now. We did have an issue, I’d say, a year ago with drivers watching the video. They were on the driveline. Let me put it that way. They’re on the driveline as they were completing their videos, we did a huge enterprise-wide audit and found all the numbers to back it up and Infinit-I actually work with us to develop the app that wouldn’t work whenever a vehicle is in motion. So that was kind of the partnership with Paladin and Infinit-I come up with a solution to a problem that we found so.
Work with team drivers too. Like will the other driver be able to take the training?
As an admin, you have the ability to shut that feature off for a team, that way the driver in the jump seat can be doing training while the vehicle is moving, but you have to manage that because then you’d have to make sure you turn it back on. But it’s literally a flip of a switch and the admin where you can turn that that feature on and off on the app.
How do you verify that they watched the video? So, you have a kind of a quiz or what?
Yes, there there’s a quiz at the end of every video content, and then there’s a report you can run or you can just simply go on to the I think they’re going to show tomorrow on the on the admin side of it, you go in and pull up that driver in their classroom to see if it is current, complete, or overdue.
Pay extra for it, right? because they are on duty, is that correct?
We don’t, but I know another affiliate, Quick Way, they own, they actually pay their drivers to watch them. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but that was an issue that, they were paying their drivers to wash them in the brake room or whatever. So, our drivers are all over the road, so they don’t come to a central location. You know, we could set them in a classroom or whatever, so.
There are a couple of ways you can do that. The system actually tracks how much time they spent from the time they log in until they complete the test. So you could actually have minutes and seconds and then you can tally that up and pay them a wage accordingly.
So, if you like California heat, your best bet is to pay them $25 for watching that video.
I would agree with that. Give them an hour for their time.
Or you’ll be in court or something.
Yeah, it’s your mandate. You must pay, but it depends.
Something else? The other takes you to court for a whole another case for that employee.
There’s a lot of discussion on owner operators and company drivers, owner operators.
We don’t currently we’re used to.
Can you exempt owner operators from the training and mandated for the company drivers?
I’m sure there is a way in the system. Now whenever we did have owner operators, we required owner operators as well. Just because there again our company culture that we were developing.
Owner offers come under your insurance company.
Absolutely. Yeah. They’re under our authority.
I can’t make them do it because they run operators.
Yeah.
Write in into their contract, especially if they’re running under your operating authority.
Absolutely.
It’s kind of like the whole camera deal. You know, we had some owner operators, so we all y’all can’t make me watch videos. Well, we can also cancel your contract. So, make them available to the industry.
Anybody else have a question? Yeah, obviously y’all can talk at dinner, but any future plans? Anything else you want to do?
Well, there was just a major upgrade to the platform. I haven’t had a lot of time to go in and play with the new system but expecting some good things there.
Distracted driving every month, I think.
We do that now, so it’s yeah. You.
So Chris you?
Said for your monthly training, you every driver does one hour of videos a month.
Roughly. Yeah, it’s usually I’d say 7 or 8 videos and so it’s usually around 45 minutes to an hour and you assign those at the beginning of the month?
Yeah, yeah, Here’s your March training and 7-8 videos, and they have until the end of the month for every driver.
So what’s the what? Does the average company do when they’re assigning?
Our average clients more like couple of videos a month. Probably two or three. Most of them are more like, you know, 15 to 20 minutes.
I would say about 3-4-5.
Again, that’s got everything to do with your philosophy and kind of where you are and how much you think you need to give them.
Paladin wants to make sure, they can defend themselves in court.
Absolutely.
Be careful though, especially early on if this is something that you think might work in your company, don’t in the first assignment, given 20 videos to watch. Because they’ll get pushed off right away. But if you start off with just one or two and they go wow, these are pretty short and it’s easy. And I like this better than go and sitting in the safety meeting all day, they’ll buy into it pretty quick. We don’t get a lot of pushback from the drivers these days, but young, young CDL holders expect that technology.
~Chris Kines
Director of Safety
Robert Bearden Inc.
https://www.rbitrucking.com/
