Safeguarding Their Most Precious Cargo

Background

For Schneider Trucking, the major focus was on building a culture of retention and improving their driver safety record. The company felt strongly about helping its drivers better balance work and home commitments. It needed to move away from a behavior-based safety approach and build a belief-based safety approach by recognizing the barriers that existed from beliefs, attitudes and values.Through our organizational culture and leadership impact survey, we helped the client to implement The Pacific Institute’s curriculum, focusing on leadership and personal excellence. It helped individuals recognize their self-beliefs and truths, as well as raising self-efficacy while developing and setting individual goals. Gaining positive momentum, the client rolled out the curriculum to all staff, including 14,000 truck drivers and contractors, with the aim of driver training and re-education to change beliefs and mindsets affecting real achievement.

Solution

• We identified the link between organizational leadership and the company’s culture, which in turn drove employee perceptions of safety and ultimately their performance.
• Working in partnership with the client, we looked at ways in which we could help senior management make a positive impact on the culture across the organization so that an enhanced constructive culture could help drive safety outcomes
• We recommended that the client needed to make safety ‘personal’, i.e. we needed to start with individual beliefs and look at ways to get greater engagement and accountability from employees regarding safety outcomes.

Outcome

• Reduced potentially severe crashes by over 50%
• Reduced fatal crashes by 59%
• Reduced fatigue-related accidents by 27%
• Reduced preventable accidents by more than 12% year over year
• $24m in productivity savings
• Daily customer contacts up by 600%
• Loads per day up by 27%
• Experienced driver hires up from 38% to 100% year over year
• 25 customer recognition awards over three years.
• The Safety & Leadership Award went to Don Osterburg, Senior VP. Awarded by USA Truck Safety Coalition, June 2010. “Through his leadership, there is now absolute, hard, solid proof that safety need not be sacrificed to promote productivity.”
• Enhanced social and community responsibility through an improved safety record and a positive, constructive culture with sustainable results