Driving safety at Balfour Beatty

By Robert Lindsay, Driver Risk Manager, Balfour Beatty

Balfour Beatty continues its work to minimise the business risks related to driving. It’s important that they keep their workers safe. And it’s helping them to create a sustainable and profitable business too.

I’m the Driver Risk Manager at Balfour Beatty, running a department that’s dedicated to minimising the risk associated with business driving. We operate in every sector from construction, civil engineering and rail, through to utilities and services. The safety of our people and the public is of paramount importance to us, and we’ve been running a Zero Harm campaign for a number of years now. Each business unit is responsible for putting in place the systems and behaviours needed to eliminate fatal risks, hazards and accidents.

Obviously everyone recognises the dangers of driving – here it’s clearly identified as one of our top fatal risks. We operate a fleet of more than 8500 vehicles in total: cars, vans and LGVs, together with more specialist equipment like gritters and grass cutters. And as most of our 35,000 employees drive to work, we recognise our responsibility there, too.

Our programme to support drivers already includes a wide range of training, including on-road coaching, workshops, e-learning modules and driving simulators. And we recently held a Driver Challenge Day, where our people and our customers could see first-hand the effect of good driving on safety.

Zero Harm also means committing to continually improving what we do. We’ve recently moved away from a number of different solutions and rolled out Drive from O2. Drivers now get immediate feedback on their driving from an in-cab feedback bar, so they can understand how they drive – in terms of acceleration, breaking, idling, and speed on cornering. It helps them understand how they can improve their driving. And the data we get back centrally is very rich – it helps us to target the people who need further training, and recognise and reward those who have been performing well. And we appreciate the value it delivers to our bottom line – we can keep people safer while reducing travel times and controlling fleet running costs.

We chose Drive from O2 because we wanted to consolidate a number of existing relationships to a single tracking and telematics supplier, with an end-to-end service. We were particularly attracted by the partnership approach with O2. We haven’t seen this being done by anyone else. And we have plans to develop our solution even further, to make more of the information that’s available at our fingertips.

With so many of our employees driving, Drive from O2 really enables us to mitigate the risks, and make sure that our people all drive home safely.

To find out more about the project so far check out our video case study. And call 01235 433 507 to arrange a discovery session and find out how Drive from O2 can help your organisation reduce risk, improve efficiency and cut costs.