Employer-Based Driver Safety Programs

Courtesy of Washington State DOT, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This article is partially derived and excerpted from BTSCRP Web-Only Document 3: Developing Employer-Based Behavioral Traffic Safety Programs for Drivers in the Workplace.

In the transportation industry, it is widely known and well documented that traffic crashes are the leading cause of workplace fatalities (1). While any workplace injury is a serious concern, on-the-job vehicle crashes can be particularly devastating, affecting the workers and their coworkers, families, communities, and employers.

Despite a fundamental understanding of the broad causal factors underlying crashes and an extensive array of employer-sponsored activities designed to improve safety and health, work-related traffic crashes remain challenging to address. Often, the precipitating factors are beyond the control or even the influence of employees, employers, or both.

Recent research and practice has shown that awareness of safety among employees (i.e., safety climate) and tangible corporate support for safety—or safety culture—may prevent or reduce the severity and frequency of traffic crashes. However, limited published research is available on the specifics of work-related, employer-based traffic safety or safety climate programs, their proliferation, and their effectiveness or the extent and means of their assessment. Generally, the use of theories of behavioral change to ground employer-based traffic safety programs is lacking. Theories are crucial in fostering behavior change because they provide a framework for understanding why people behave the way they do, as well as informing the development of effective interventions to encourage the desired changes.

BTSCRP [Behavioral Traffic Safety Cooperative Research Program] Web-Only Document 3: Developing Employer-Based Behavioral Traffic Safety Programs for Drivers in the Workplace identifies and illuminates those critical components.

Tom Saunders, Virginia DOT, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For this research project, employer-based behavioral traffic safety programs were defined as ongoing organizational initiatives designed to reduce the risk of an employee being in a road accident, reduce the severity of an injury if a collision occurs, or improve driving safety while driving for work. Such programs tend to be predicated on the idea that a supportive corporate safety culture can change attitudes toward safety and lead to individual changes in behavior. They typically include one or more of the following:

• Employer-based driver training and coaching programs
• Monitoring of driver behavior using in-vehicle monitoring and telematics systems (i.e., remote collection and transmission of data)
• A wide variety of organizational efforts to promote a favorable safety culture and climate, including reward programs and communications

The project included the following objectives:

• Document the components of existing employer-based behavioral traffic safety programs for workers who operate motor vehicles.
• Use behavioral change theories to identify essential components of programs.
• Identify measures of program effectiveness and support for program evaluation.
• Develop a guidance document and interactive web-based tool to help plan, implement, and evaluate an employer-based behavioral traffic safety program.

Current Employer Practices

The state-of-the-practice overview included a literature review and series of structured interviews with representatives of transit agencies, corporate trucking companies, employers of other types of drivers, and safety organizations that publish employee driver-safety materials. Published studies from two sources were examined. Individual studies provided details about specific programs and measures of effectiveness, while those conducted by academic research programs examined safety-related initiatives across multiple studies over time, as well as across organizations or populations. The grouping of research programs allowed for generalizability of the findings across organizations or populations.

Courtesy of Oregon DOT, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

The review summarized current research literature concerning employer-based behavioral traffic safety programs and identified the types and extent of behavioral change theories and measures of program effectiveness currently in use. The role and relevance of safety culture, safety climate, or both in these studies were also identified. Corporations, organizations, and employers have implemented various programs to address and reduce work-related traffic crashes based on the safety-climate perspective. These programs are predicated on the idea that a supportive corporate safety culture can change attitudes toward safety and lead to individual changes in behavior.

While industrial and organizational psychologists distinguish between safety culture and safety climate, the phrase “safety culture” is used more frequently than “safety climate” in the literature. Safety culture is defined as shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that characterize an organization (2, 3). Theoretically, safety climate is the more immediate situational influence on behavior that can be measured with a questionnaire.

The literature review described the current state of the practice as follows:

• There is limited explicit use of behavioral change theory in designing or evaluating employer-based driver safety programs.
• Evidence of the effectiveness of behavioral change theory in general exists but is insufficient to determine the relative effectiveness of the specific theories.
• General or one-size-fits-all driver safety programs may not be effective for employer-based programs, given behavioral change theory’s demonstration of the need to consider individual differences.
• Safety climate captures employees’ perceptions of what the organization rewards and supports and is consistently associated with safe and unsafe driver behaviors, the importance of safety, and the effectiveness of traffic safety programs.
• Relatively few traffic safety programs have undergone a rigorous evaluation using experimental-versus-control groups or other experimental study design.

The results of the literature review also were used to develop the employer interview protocol.

Interviews with employers and practitioners engaged in safety programs validated knowledge gained from the literature review while also filling in gaps that the literature review did not address. Specifically, the interviews gathered information on existing employer-based safety programs aimed at employee traffic safety and behavioral traffic safety concerns (e.g., distraction and speeding). The interviews also solicited information regarding the process used to select, adopt, and evaluate these programs. The results of the interviews guided and informed the remainder of the project.

Courtesy of Oregon DOT, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Key points across all four aforementioned categories of employers interviewed include the following:

• Safety culture was strong and actively promoted among corporate trucking companies and transit agencies. There was more variation in safety culture observed among the employers of other types of drivers. However, the presence of a safety culture seemed to increase with the degree of driving hazards or risk.
• The Smith System—a proprietary, defensive-driving–based packaged safety program—was widely referenced by corporate trucking companies.
• Exemplary programs implemented in corporate trucking companies may be transferable across the trucking sector and to other industries.
• Packaged programs were common among transit agencies. The selection of a specific package seemed related to peer agency practice.
• Overall, across employer types, evaluation of specific safety programs amounted to monitoring of driver performance and events such as crashes.
• Common metrics to assess performance included the number of crashes, near misses, or incidents, and behavioral triggers such as the frequency of speeding, hard braking, and public complaints. Some employers compared their company’s performance with that of their peers; some used industry statistics; and some used both.
• Safety organizations are highly specialized and very diverse. Safety organizations and the programs or approaches they provide are evolutionary and respond to the needs of their constituency. In some cases, the need is imposed (e.g., by government regulation), while in others it emerges (e.g., technological changes increase in-vehicle distractions for drivers).
• Safety organizations typically assess their performance based on the distribution and use of materials rather than on outcomes.

Lucylonghauler, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Behavioral Change Theory

The project included two activities with regard to the application of behavioral change theory to practice. One activity involved identification of the relevant behavioral change theories in existing safety programs, while the other identified the critical components. The research team anticipated that this would result in a catalogue of safety programs with their associated behavioral change theory and critical components. However, this was not entirely possible as the development of most programs did not appear to be based on behavioral change theory. When theory was considered, detailed information about how it was incorporated was unavailable. Although the literature review identified multiple behavioral change theories in the professional driver training materials, only the following were explicitly mentioned:

Theory of Planned Behavior

This theory views behavior as a function of someone’s intentions to engage in the behavior, which are shaped by attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (Figure 1). Attitudes refer to how favorably or unfavorably an individual perceives the behavior (4). Subjective norms refer to the social expectations regarding the behavior that a person perceives from influential others. Perceived behavioral control refers to someone’s perception of factors that limit and facilitate engagement in a certain behavior.

Transtheoretical Model of Change

This model describes a six-step change process to an individual’s behavior. The six steps are as follows:

1. Precontemplation—The individual is not yet ready to change.
2. Contemplation—The individual is getting ready to change.
3. Preparation—The individual is ready to change.
4. Action—Behavior change is initiated.
5. Maintenance—Behavior change is monitored.
6. Termination—Old behavior is no longer present (5).

Measures of Effectiveness

While there is consensus on the underlying factors relating to program success, there is limited research on the specifics—including the extent and means of program assessment. Similarly, there are significant challenges inherent in behavior modification programs—and employer-based traffic safety programs, in particular. Most of these challenges involve overcoming the following key characteristics of the traffic safety culture in the United States:

• Complacency and indifference to some 40,000 traffic deaths per year that make such tolls appear normal or acceptable (6). 
• Technological advances and improvements in the safety of equipment that can encourage riskier driver behavior.
• Unscientific campaigns that focus only on informing people of how many deaths are associated with a particular activity in the false belief that it will lead to a change in attitude and behavior.
• The relativity of safety culture, whereby the influence of social, cultural, and contextual factors on safety attitudes varies across organizations (7).

Courtesy of Oregon DOT, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Program analysis, along with assessment procedures and protocols, are critical aspects in the success and proliferation of employer-based traffic safety programs and how they address those challenges. Toward that end, two phases of the project were devoted to identifying measures of program effectiveness.

Phase 1 activities yielded detailed information on measures of effectiveness from 23 research studies and eight research programs, along with information gathered through employer interviews. Most of the measures of effectiveness studied were based on monitoring or examining program outcomes rather than implementation or assessing trainee responses. In roughly half the cases, measures of effectiveness relied on self-reported and archival data or company records, with approximately 30 percent using only self-reported data and roughly 20 percent using only archival data or company records. Overall, the identified measures of effectiveness pertained to driver attitudes, intentions, behaviors, and—to a lesser extent—outcomes.

In contrast to academic studies, employer-based traffic safety programs occur in the real world, where classic research designs are rare. Accordingly, there were no traditional, comprehensive evaluations of specific safety programs or whether to retain or terminate a program. As a result, employers typically have no formal measures of effectiveness. Instead, they monitored driver behavior and events to identify problems and then modified their safety programs to address these problems.

Phase 2 of the project focused on developing guidance for safety program evaluation and measures of effectiveness. It then related the guidance back to specific examples from the literature and interviews. The guidance is based on the research team’s experience and knowledge of behavioral theory and its application to safety programs, tempered and informed by information from the employer interviews.

When starting a safety program evaluation, it can be informative to begin by recognizing what an ideal evaluation would entail and then determining how to best meet that standard within a real-world context under time and resource constraints. In a hypothetical ideal scenario, a safety program and its evaluation would include the following four key features:

• A clear definition of the outcome or what the program is trying to address or change and how that relates to the objectives of the organization’s operating environment
• A behavioral change theory or theories tied to the desired outcomes
• Clearly defined measures of effectiveness and valid data sources to assess the program’s impact
• A research design that maximizes pre-program, immediate post-program, and delayed post-program assessment of measures of effectiveness, along with any additional design features (e.g., control groups), where possible

This hypothetical situation assumes that the definition of the problem will indicate the details of the program evaluation strategy and measures and that there are adequate pre- and post-program data for the targeted behavior. Absent a formal classical research design, there are many quasi-experimental designs available that provide viable alternatives.

In practice, the selection of program outcomes is critical for determining appropriate measures of effectiveness. Specific evaluation designs and the definition of measures of effectiveness are often dictated by the data available. The rigor of a program evaluation is influenced by the evaluation design and quality of the measures of effectiveness. Program outcomes and measures are multidimensional. Therefore, a given safety program can target one or more outcomes, measure multiple variables, and measure any given variable in multiple ways.

In addition, Phase 2 led to the selection of a logic model framework to help practitioners in planning and evaluating their programs. Widely used in behavioral health, logic models are visual diagrams that illustrate how a program’s inputs, activities, outputs, and intermediate outcomes lead to the program’s impact or long-term outcomes. As such, they permit progress assessments at various points in a program, not simply the long-term impact—which may not occur until months or years after the program’s implementation.

Online Guidance Tool

BTSCRP WebResource 1, the interactive, web-based tool developed during the project, distills complex concepts and detailed information into an easy-to-understand and flexible means for employers to learn about current practice and theory, as well as tap resources for planning, implementing, and evaluating an employer-based behavioral traffic safety program. It incorporates theory, previous research, and lessons learned from practice, along with various planning aids. These include an introduction to behavioral change theory, overviews of academic studies and measures of program effectiveness, and a logic-model template to aid program development and implementation. In addition, the online tool features case examples from employer interviews to promote the sharing of innovative practices across employer types. These examples also formed the basis of a series of rolling safety insights on the tool’s home page. Although its main audiences are practitioners and employers, the tool preserves the granular detail and complex analysis of behavioral change theories and associated literature, making them accessible to academic researchers.

The online tool presents the layout and flow of content in the web-based tool in the sequence of web pages a typical user would experience. Taken together, the guidance document—accompanied by the interactive web-based tool—provides employers with virtual step-by-step instructions for planning, implementing, and evaluating behavioral traffic safety programs.

Conclusion

This project assessed the state-of-the-practice with respect to the implicit or explicit incorporation of behavioral change theory into employer-provided traffic safety programs. It demonstrated the critical role that behavioral change theory can play in maximizing the success and impact on short- and long-term outcomes of employer-provided driver safety programs and identified essential program components and measures of effectiveness within the theoretical context. The project benefitted from strong engagement and interest from employers and practitioners, who participated in interviews and reviewed project products. Their input ensured that the project findings were applicable across employer and fleet types.

Given the desire to promote the use of behavioral change theory to build a strong foundation for future employer-provided traffic safety programs, the project culminated with easy-to-access guidance for planning, implementing, and evaluating these programs. The guidance—delivered as an interactive web-based tool—was well received by employers who engaged in the project. In addition, the web-based tool allows employers and practitioners to learn innovative and successful approaches from others—even in different industries—through detailed case examples and related safety insights.