Fleet health and safety should be a 24/7 priority for every well-run fleet. But now more than ever, fleet managers need to rethink and redouble their focus on fleet health and safety practices to keep their fleet, their drivers and the public safe. 

The National Safety Council has declared June as the National Safety Month, focusing on saving lives and preventing injuries and illnesses. In support of the NSC, Amerit is rolling out 5 Safety Initiatives all month long. 

Seeing Safety
Week 1

Amerit leads the fleet maintenance industry with our safety progressive and proactive fleet health and safety practices but creating and maintaining a culture of safety is a never ending process. 

Seeing Safety is that 6th sense you develop because you’re always looking for things that can hurt you.  It’s easy to become complacent when you are in familiar places. That box by the door or the extension cord that lives on the floor don’t seem unsafe because they’re been there for so long. This normalization is called inattentional blindness, or perceptual blindness and can lead to many unnecessary, and avoidable incidents and injuries and many thousands of dollars in claims and lawsuits.

Cultivating and concentrating on the ability to recognize unsafe conditions this week will help you identify those items that have become normalized.

During this week Amerit employees will be learning and focusing on seeing unsafe situations. It’s usually the most obvious things that you miss, the things you walk past a thousand times and never realized they are actually unsafe because “they’ve always been that way”. 

Here are some ideas to help you train your team to embrace fleet health and safety:

• Hold a safety & hazard hunt- reward your employees for finding both safe and unsafe conditions.
• Open a communication channel for anonymous reporting of unsafe work conditions
• Hold periodic Safety stand-downs: ask your employees to pause for a few minutes and assess their work environment and practices. Is there something on the floor that they could slip on? Are they wearing the correct PPE? Pausing normal activities to reflect can lead to positive changes and demonstrates to employees that you care about their safety.

Amerit’s National Safety Month Initiatives will be rolled out each week. Next week look for our post about “Safety Around the Clock”.