Are Truck Driver Road Tests Required & Should I Use A Dash Cam?

Randy Badiuk and John Farquhar join me this week and we are talking about Road Test and Dash Cams. 

Randy Badiuk Contact Info:
Email: randy@cdtstrategies.com
Phone: (519) 380-5292
Web: www.cdtstrategies.com
 
John Farquhar Contact Info:
Email: John@summitrisksolutions.ca
Phone: 226) 802-2762
Follow John on Twitter, @1975Buick
Connect with John on Linkedin, http://linkedin.com/in/john-farquhar-9b88771a2

Transcript

0:01

Hey, it's Chris safety, dawg, just before we get to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that on March the sixth, we have a virtual truck driver meeting. Now you all know about how important it is to keep training or truck drivers, even during COVID. So if you'd like more information on how to have your drivers attend the virtual training on March the sixth, I want you to call a K R T S Kim Sytsma-Hill at +1 800-771-8171. Her extension is 205. She's got all the details. Tell her that you heard it here on the Dawg On-It Trucking Pawedcast. Hey guys. Welcome to the dog audit trucking podcast this week. We've got Mr. Randy, Badiuk and John Farquhar. John, can you take a second to introduce yourself to our listeners and viewers? Sure, sure. I'm I'm John Farquhar and I own a summit risk solutions and she's got 40 plus years in the trucking industry here now. So I have taken some at risk solutions and I specialize in providing transportation risk evaluations for transportation companies, help them better understand what, what they need to know, what they need to understand and deal with on a daily basis. Well, Mr. Randy, first time we've met actually. So Randy, tell me, I know you are a hazmat guru or dangerous goods phenomenon, but besides that, what else do you do? Well, Thanks for having me. My name is Randy Badiuk. I operate CDT Strategies and similar to John I've been in the India industry close to 40 years now and dangerous goods and bulk liquid is my, my background. And for the last seven years, I've been helping companies with their strategies and compliance areas and just lending that hand where we can to, to make the roads we operate on and the communities, hopefully just that much safer, but looking forward to our session. Awesome. Now this means that basically we've got three competitors all in one screen, You could, you could call it that. I like to say we're strategic partners and this is true. Okay. Because I have a great deal of respect for each of you, Randy. I've never met you, but I, your reputation precedes you. So, okay. I always like to say we're all one string in the rope and the more strings we have, the stronger the rope was together. Perfect. Great, good, good analogy. In today's Conversation, we're going to be talking, I kind of equated to driver files. So like, you know, the importance of a road test. Why do you need a proper orientation? The cost of turnover, wherever the conversation kind of leads us. That's what we're throwing against the wall. Randy, it looks like you wanted to say something. Nope. Just, just waiting to help where we can. All right. Well, let's start off with the importance of a road test. Why in the heck and Randy, I'll let you go first on this one. What the heck is so important about a road evaluation? Well, I think the road evaluation is a true look behind. However, I think we've all seen carriers and situations where the road test is generic at best. We've all seen road toasts that are completed and it has a checkbox beside what does that mean? They were good. They were average. They were skillset was the road test five minutes, five hours. And based on a lot of the experiences that I've seen, I started to change my thinking a bit down to three elements. Number one, I started a numerical scoring system using eight as the baseline. If you were acceptable, you're at eight. That way, when the applicant was a little higher skillset, you could bump it up to a nine. You could bump it up to a 10 or likewise. If there was an area of opportunity, you could pull it down to a seven or a six. So it put a little bit of a heartbeat to the page where you could look at it six months later and say, Oh, this driver has that opportunity to get better here. Or they were stronger in this area. That was part one out of the three. And part two, I sorta like to see the road tests unique to that carrier and break it down by the route. So if you have a road that is 80 kilometers, long, 50 kilometers long, break it down. The scoring of that turn right out of the yard. You're going through a school zone. You're getting onto a highway and score each leg of that road test separately. So you could see if there's consistent areas where there's weakness or strengths. And finally, I, I sort of thought it was interesting to potentially use a dash cam during the road observation. So when you get back to the terminal, you have that opportunity to review it with the driver where you can say, this is maybe what you could have done different or is your strengths As opposed to being a little distracting in the cab while the observations going on. Awesome. Thanks for Indy, John. Then you add, Oh geez, it's hard. The good at this. I have to admit, but probably the biggest fall, Randy kind of touched on it right at the beginning was carriers. Aren't going far enough to evaluate those drivers. You know, all the points that Randy touched on are things that should be part of their everyday process. When evaluating a driver, they're not taking into account the areas and regions, the environments that, that driver's going to operate in. So, you know, it's a 15 minute road test rather than something that should be two, maybe three hours long getting in-depth into what it is as Randy touched on. There's multiple areas of scoring that need to be touched on that the driver needs to understand, do they have the skillset? They hold a ticket early enough. Well, and why is, let me ask, start with John this time. Why is scoring important as opposed to the old checkbox type? Well, the checks Bach is, you know, it's kind of a yes or a no type approach when yes and a no, these days does not work. We need to know what level of yes. What level of no, you know, so the evaluation process. So as Randy touched on in the scoring mechanism, that's an excellent way to be able to tell the level of skill, you know, and, and the approach of that evaluation being transparent, to be able to say, well, a one is this a 10? Is this, you know, and where are you in here? So you can talk about the strengths and the weaknesses, because obviously when you're done doing the evaluation, you might go, God, he's got the right attitude, but he's got some skills that he needs to work on here a little bit. Let's put him with a mentoring driver and then share that road evaluation with that mentor, or to be able to say, here's the areas you scored weekend, and this is what he needs some strengths on. And in addition to that, John, if the carrier is doing a periodic re-evaluation, whoever is doing that, like you said, the driver mentor can see the previous report or there could be a turnover in staff. So it gives a little historical background of the completed observations. Yep. The question I was going to ask of Randy, you've probably seen these in driver files where you walk in and it's the checkbox type roadie evaluation, and everything is checked and no comments. And I look at it, I go, Hm, that means he's a perfect driver Gone. Yeah. Ever road tested the perfect driver I've road tested several amazing drivers, but not the perfect driver, because I think we all have developed habits where we can improve our own skillsets. We all have opportunities to improve. Yeah. And that's why I really liked the idea that you stayed in the boat scoring because it gives us the opportunity to say there's room. You're a great driver, but there's room for improvement here. Or from a safety perspective. Let me give you this suggestion. And it might make you a better driver yet. And even though you already score. And the other thing I really like about it is if you set a scoring baseline or low score for qualification, you've mentioned eight. So in my world, I use 80%. As long as you score 80% or above, you've passed the road test, but we're not gonna, I haven't tested that perfect driver yet. Sure. And I think the other element of scoring brings a benefit is a driver who may be scored quite high, 89, 90, but they were reevaluated a couple of years later. And in that interim, they've developed those habits. Now, suddenly they're down into the high seventies range that you can tell what happened. How did this habit develop? Yeah. John, how do you break habits? Well, my, my grandfather used to use a big stick that, that seemed to work on me a little bit. But yeah, it's, it's coaching, it's a, it's mentoring. It's bringing to the driver, the awareness of what the habit is talking about, whether it's a good habit or a bad habit and what we need to curb the behavior, as Randy said, and touched on it earlier, a dash camera, you know, or a three 60 camera in the vehicle while you're doing that, it's amazing what you can pick up, especially if you're seeing, if you can see what the driver's doing while he's operating a vehicle, the different things that are just habits, you know, and then show them what they're doing there. They're all of a sudden gonna go, Oh my God, I didn't know. I do not. I, I didn't realize I did that. You know, I, you know, the pandemic is a perfect realization of the habits we have. How many times do we touch our face in a day? And they say, don't do it, but you're doing it. You don't even realize you're doing it. Drivers have the thing. You know, I know one of my habits was a 10 and two position on the steering wheel and, you know, I would hold it at a 10 and rest environment of gear shift. You know, didn't have two hands on the wheel. I thought it was a perfectly good driver, not a problem, you know, but when you needed to make that evasive maneuver, you realized all of a sudden you didn't have full control. Cause you only had one hand on the steering wheel. So, so things like that, you don't realize it until it's brought to your attention because you're thinking I don't have any bad habits. Everything's good. I haven't had a crash. I'm okay. Okay. I thought Randy was going to add something there. Well, I, I think again, when drivers are used to driving a specific unit and they change company suddenly now mere positioning is slightly different depending on the make and model of the equipment. Transmissions could be a little bit different, just the whole environment within the cab. They have to readjust themselves to that new environment. And I think there's that period in there that it just takes to change those habits. As you said, John driving with one hand on the stickiness to it it's for so long that that was culture. And I now have a question about dash cam, since you both mentioned dash camps, Brandy, how do you use dash cams? Well, first of all, address the question, are they important or not? Should every company have them or not? And then how do you use them? I personally feel every truck should be equipped with it. I believe take the incident situation away just for every day. It would help the supervisor for lack of better words of the driver, be able to monitor what they're doing, whether it's turning in the right corner, going into a customer site, as opposed to going around the block and following the path, just following some comp was an operations that you can monitor the activity of the driver. You can, you know, lane positioning if on the multi-lane road, if your company procedures stay in the right-hand lane, regardless of speed, you can, you can see that driver's behavior with her without a collision. You're just looking at overall and for the drivers that are following the expectation, then it gives them validation as well that I know as a driver, the company is seeing I'm doing what they say they want me to do. Right. John, how do you, first of all, do you believe in dash cams or not? Oh, huge fan of them. I have, I have one in each of my personal vehicles. I wouldn't drive a vehicle without a dash camera. Now, you know, the, The evidence that it provides, the information, coaching opportunities, unbelievable. I, you know, and all the travels that I do, you know, taking some of the footage out of my personal dash cam just to show my wife and my kids that look what happened in front of me here earlier this week and, and see the incident and talk about how we avoid these situations. So in a commercial vehicle, I think it should be mandatory, you know, not for the sake of watching after the driver, but to be able to there's many opportunities we can exonerate the driver. The driver is the first one to get accused when a third party does something incorrectly in front of them, but there's no evidence to prove otherwise. So this is, this is a big help. And then secondly, it becomes a huge coaching technique as Randy touched on, you know, being able to share that with a supervisor or, you know, with the technology that's there today, we can see it live real time. You know, there there's no if ands or buts, I could be logging in and, and see the, see what's going on out the front window immediately. Let's if you have, so there's two different types or as far as I can think of two different types of dash cams, the cloud-based and the SD card, correct to what have you want to tackle and we'll throw it to Randy, but do you, do you want to talk about what the heck's the difference and if you had a choice, which one would you choose? Well, I think my obvious choice would be at the cloud-based one. It has virtually limitless capacity where the SD card is just like our old cassette tape in the car. You only can put so much information on an, you know, 16 and a half songs and it's full. And I think there are numerous stories out there where unfortunately, the SD cards were full. They weren't purged. Although the camera was operating, then you lost the opportunity or the value of what that camera provided. Plus, you know, I'm going to use the word nuisance in a positive way of having to continuously purge the card. So I think cloud-base is, is, and it's more accessible to the individuals who are back at the terminal, John, John, what would you, Yeah, you, you, you definitely get that real time ability with the cloud camera where, you know, the SD card, if a driver says, Hey, I had an incident and I caught it on camera. You're not going to get to look at it until he gets back to the terminal. We take that, download the footage into your computer and, and look at it from there. So you have a lag time by all means. But most definitely the biggest problem that we do see with the SD is Randy hit on it. It's not maintaining it properly. Next thing you know, it's full and you've overwritten so much information that it's no good to you now. So, you know, SD card cameras were okay. Not to say they were a bad thing. There they were okay. Before the cloud come in. Cause that was the only way we had. But now that we have cloud-based and real-time, it's almost like, why wouldn't you, you know, if I had a, a fleet of even four trucks, I'd be gone, no we're going cloud-based we need that information now because I want to defend you, Mr. Driver. I want to prove that you're doing the right job here, you know? And at the same time, if you pick up a bad habit, we want to talk about correcting that behavior immediately. I don't want to wait until a week down the road when well, now we've had a crash Because of it and correct that behavior for the positive reasons. Yeah, correct. Yeah. Just in the event of an incidence to prevent the incident. And it's why we go to the chiropractor to align things before it gets too bad. Yeah. And, and, and with that opportunity, you get to take that information and share it with other drivers, you know, to be able to say, Hey, learning opportunity for everybody, not just that one driver. So yeah. Yeah. And I just realized we didn't do a test before we did this. I hope I'm capturing everything correctly. The other thought I had, so Randy, you already hit on formatting of the SD cards because if you use the SD card type, you've got to go out on a regular basis and format those damn things, as you said, they may not be there. The other advantage that I would throw out there for the cloud-based ones is a lot of them give the safety department and alert and alert when an event happens. So a heartbreak or something that Randy you want to absolutely. And that, again, it may not be leading to an incident that moment, but it could be seeing a definite trend or a pattern of why is this individual driver having those heartbreaks and just giving that learning opportunity in that moment to, to correct the behavior, to correct the culture. So they don't, and it's measurable. We can't do anything unless we can measure it. So, so I think it's just rock solid information that we can use to help protect that driver and ultimately the fleet. Yeah. And John something did. Yeah, no, it's, he's spot on, you know, if you, if you don't have the information, you just can't measure it, you know, and, and manage what you don't measure simple as that. So it causes grief. If you don't have what's going on, it makes life so simple. Now, compared to what we had years ago, when we didn't even have a dash camera, we had to rely on everybody's word. We had to hope everybody was telling the truth, you know? And you were trying to give your driver the benefit of the doubt because he's your employee. You're trying to defend him when this third party has said, Oh, your truck cut me off. You know, and we have no evidence of any other sort, you know? So, so now it's like, Oh, now I have all this evidence and I can prove the four Wheeler did not get cut off by the big truck. It was the opposite way around. And courts are now using that to their benefit, to streamline processes and insurance folks, lawyers, everybody they're loving it. Yeah. It's I know from my insurance days and John, you're probably the same. The insurance companies love dash Cannes. Whether they prove you to be innocent or guilty, they love them because if you're guilty, their experience says, Hey, the sooner we close this claim, the less it costs us. So if we're guilty, let's pay it out and get rid of it. And in the majority of cases, I believe approves proves our driver. The professional truck driver was actually not guilty and approves or innocence. And it makes the claim also go away at a much cheaper price. Absolutely. Guys, we're going to have to do this again because our time is just the boat up. I will have contact info. And all we did is talk about road tests and the road tests and the dash cam. But I will have your contact info in the show notes below Randy. Whereabouts are you located? I'm in London. All right. And, and Mr. Farquhar, just outside of Woodstock. So we got London, we got Woodstock and we got Hamilton. So we got kind of the, the West end of Ontario covered. Yep, absolutely. And I would encourage the listeners and viewers, you know, if you know me, I hoped for these two guys on camera. I can actually say that. As I said, I haven't met Randy before, but his, his reputation proceeds him. Mr. Farquhar. And I have crossed paths for years. As I know, I know John and actually, John, I don't know if you realize you were the only golf game I had this year. It was the day that you and I got it. Well, you know what, it's, it's funny. Cause the, the only time that I golfed was with you and Randy, that was it. So, so now we'll have to get the three of us together. We'll have to work on it guys. Thanks so much. As I say, the contact info is below. If any of our listeners and viewers want to reach out, ask, please shoot a note to Randy or to John or to myself. All right. That's it for this week safety dogs out. Thanks Chris. There was that painters that was only 23 minutes, but I thought if we got going, I hope you love the show. As much as I did, please leave us a, like a thumbs up a review, a comment, a rating. If it is, thank you so much. And I do really appreciate your time and join us again next week for another exciting interview.