By Stephen Haughey, Consultant IPWEA FLEET and Proprietor XDrive (www.xdrive.com.au)

Firefighters, elite athletes and military units throughout the world all have one thing in common – TRAINING.

Training cultivates Best Practice and Continuous Improvement.

Yet as Fleet Managers we sometimes, if not more frequently, overlook this first critical aspect towards safety and competency.

Take for instance firefighters. With the recent bush fires throughout the country one can see the impact of continuous training which has been undertaken by all of the men and women of the Rural Fire Services, State Emergency Services and indeed all of the paid and volunteer workers involved in the front line defence against these fires.

The fundamentals of where equipment is stored, and how it works, is practiced over and over again until opening a panel, attaching a fitting or turning on a pump becomes second nature – even in the dark.

Training applies as much to any organisation with a vehicle fleet as it does with a group of dedicated firefighters and therefore we should consider training and in particular driver training as one of the first things that we invest our money in.

Understandably, organisations have competing and sometimes conflicting resources all vying for a portion of the funds allocated to a department. This may result in difficulties getting monies apportioned towards training days – particularly when the paybacks of training are sometimes seen as intangible or theoretical and therefore easily undervalued. It’s usually not until we experience the benefits ourselves that we grasp the importance of training.

A range of capabilities is required to become a competent driver. Proficiencies that need to be taught and understood include on-road and off-road vehicle dynamics, essential crash avoidance, recovery and proper loading and tie down procedures. Even with years of driving under our belts, we still need to hone these skills with regular refresher courses.

There are a number of basic skills that should be taught and practiced on a consistent basis. These include skills such as driver ergonomics (i.e. seating and steering), tyre management, fatigue minimisation, vehicle control, avoiding road hazards and driving safely in all weather conditions. These are just some of the skillsets that require continuous assessment and improvement.

This concept of continuous improvement brings us back to our original premise regarding elite athletes or sportspeople who may be at the pinnacle of their respective fields. Think top golfers or tennis players as an example. They all have a coach. Why would the number one in the world need someone to coach them?

So, that they can strive to become the best or stay at the top of their game. 

Think the last time you had someone coach you regarding your driving behavior. Did you take this constructively or were you upset that someone should dare to suggest that you were not ‘the best driver’? This is where a ‘Pareto Analysis’ is useful.

Essentially a Pareto Analysis is used to qualify, in the presence of constraints, the best use of limited resources (i.e. time and money). This is something I do with the military whenever I train them. In the military context, training time is the constraint and limited resource. So, the purpose of the Pareto Analysis is to illustrate what they should spend time doing to best accomplish their purpose for existence, which is achieving mission success. In a business context, this would be about prioritising time spent on key activities that lead to meeting or exceeding organisational goals. 

Using this type of analysis, one can very quickly come to the realisation about the consequences that lead to success or failure. In relation to the military example, it was found that more than 80% of time was spent on training to shoot and less than 20% of time was spent on teaching driving best practice. Yet, it was discovered that less than 20% of the time was actually required for shooting and more than 80% of time required superior driving skills and behaviour. 

Did this become a mandate to make our military less competent at shooting? Absolutely not! But it was obvious that a bit more time was needed towards driver training. Hence, it was a perfect example of the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) because by simply doing the comparison it became clear that additional training time was required to sufficiently improve driver competencies.

This Pareto principle applies right across the majority of organisations that I have trained and it is rather sad that driver training fails to be considered as part of the primary training necessities for a substantial number of organisations. Thus, I appeal to organisations to re-prioritise this important training requirement.