Why companies need to ensure drivers are carrying out walk around checks

FleetCheck Friday!

Why should companies ensure their drivers are carrying out walk around checks?

A walk round check is more than a ‘tick-box’ exercise as it ensures your vehicle is fit for the road. Increasingly we have been seeing evidence that drivers are treating essential walk around checks on their company vehicles as a “tick box” exercise.

These inspections should ideally be carried out on a daily basis, and so it is perhaps inevitable that some degree of fatigue sets in. Drivers may just go through motions rather than carry out a genuine inspection and do so for very human reasons – perhaps they are late to a meeting or the weather is poor. However, it is the responsibility of employers to ensure that these checks are being done, especially if there is evidence that drivers’ attention is drifting over time.

A typical giveaway is if a vehicle is taken in for a service and a tyre tread depth is reported to be below the legal limit or the standard depth used for replacement on the fleet, even though the driver’s recent checks recorded them as OK. This is a very clear flag that the driver concerned isn’t taking their checks seriously or doesn’t understand how to carry them out properly. It is the kind of thing that may well be picked up by th authorities in the event of an accident and subsequent investigation.

How to solve the problem? A simple but effective measure is to make it a part of your company risk management policy to watch a driver conduct a check every year or six months, effectively auditing their walk around skills. For example, one of the issues we have identified is that if you ask drivers to do a walk around check, it is not uncommon to dins that some don’t know how to open the bonnet and check essential fluid levels. Watching the employee in action is a good way of underlining the fact that you take this issue very seriously. Certainly, it is a simple way of addressing the fatigue that we are seeing on an anecdotal basis.

Say goodbye to chasing paper check sheets!

FleetCheck Driver is a robust way to plan, carry out, communicate and record all forms of essential vehicle and driver safety. Designed to not only fully streamline the vehicle inspection process and remove the need for manual paper trails, FleetCheck Driver also gives drivers the facility to submit fit to drive declarations, input fuel purchases, report incidents and more.

All information submitted instantly alerts the fleet department and can be audited within the FleetCheck platform giving your company complete control of all your fleet tasks. Regular audited vehicle inspections are a fundamental element of fleet management. Thanks to FleetCheck Driver, you can be confident that your inspection process is a robust and complies with the DVSA safety and maintenance guide, all with minimal intervention and zero paperwork.

Book a call with one of our team to discuss FleetCheck and how it can help your business!