Keeping your mobile workplaces safe as new law drives up

Business owners are watching the proposed Health and Safety Reform Bill closely. But changes to legislation could also stimulate growth for companies in the fleet management sector.

The Bill is currently before Parliament, with a report from a select committee due next week and an expectation that it will come into force in the second half of the year. As the first major change to the Health and Safety in Employment Act (1992), its stated aim is to reduce New Zealand’s workplace injury and death rate 25% by 2020. It’s modelled closely on the Australian Work Health and Safety Act, which has been the catalyst for a 16% reduction in work-related deaths since 2012.

Among the changes in the New Zealand Reform Bill are sharper definitions for who is responsible for primary workplace safety – the newly defined Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBU) – a revision of standards over what is “reasonably practicable” responsibility for workplace safety and three tiers of offence relating to breaches of health and safety rules.

A key difference in the bill from existing legislation is that directors of a company could be held liable for failing to ensure that a PCBU complies with health and safety regulations – even if they have not directly contributed to the failure.

In short, the onus will be on all business owners and directors to be more proactive in terms of workplace safety. This is a particularly important issue for companies running fleet vehicles, which are already regarded as workplaces under currently legislation: more stringent rules mean even more complexity over what are essentially mobile workplaces.

Casey Molloy, national sales manager of GPS-tracking specialist company Smartrak, says he’s already seeing an increase in enquiry from fleet operators in anticipation of the new legislation: “There are different angles to fleet safety. You can look at the people driving the vehicle: are they properly trained, have they done courses and so on.

“A greater component is safety for lone workers. If you’re sending somebody out on a job alone, what has an organisation done to keep that person safe?

“Or from the business side of things, do you know how a vehicle is actually being operated? If a vehicle is being driven erratically, there is an accident and it could have been prevented, the business could be liable.”

This sharper focus on safety is also stimulating the broader fleet management business, according to SG Fleet general manager Geoff Tipene: “The notion of having an in-house fleet manager is in danger of becoming redundant. Unless that person is 100% up to speed, the directors of that company face liability. We’re seeing companies move toward a total outsourcing solution to keep compliant.

“There are a lot of things we [a fleet management provider] do that are complementary to workplace safety: maintenance but also driver licensing management. It’s crucial for a company to know that its drivers have the right licence for the type of vehicle they are operating.”

GPS monitoring of fleet vehicles is perhaps the ultimate means of overseeing a fleet and its drivers. The technology is now commonplace; burgeoning availability of GPS hardware in the last decade has fuelled businesses such as Smartrak but monitoring and managing fleets requires infrastructure and specialised equipment.

“The business has expanded rapidly as cellular technology has improved,” says Mr Molloy. “The way it works is that you get a GPS position from the satellite but you actually communicate through the cellphone network. It’s really only in the past three years that there has been a mass appeal toward GPS for fleets.”

Mr Tipene agrees: “The technology has become better and with that improvement has come a reduction in cost. It’s a little like the hybrid and green-car movement: a few years ago it was extremely expensive to use green technology but now it’s quite viable. The industry has moved on, there are more products available and you can align prices to particular customers.”

Monitoring hardware is generally hard-wired into vehicles, so that the business knows it’s in the right car and providing accurate information. Off-the-shelf software is available, although specialist companies such as Smartrak develop their own to customise solutions for their clients.

“In the health and safety space it’s all about knowing where a vehicle is,” says Mr Molloy. “You can log onto a computer, look at a map and see exactly where it is.

“But with in-vehicle GPS technology, the potential then expands exponentially. You can start to look at vehicle-based reporting: are drivers cornering too harshly, are they spending too much time going over the speed limit? There are a myriad of reporting solutions.

“We’re already seeing this shift towards the safety of staff [in fleet cars], although the added benefit of monitoring driver behaviour is still there. A lot of people call up with no reference to health and safety – they just want to be able to do more with the resources they’ve got.

“For some larger organisations it’s actually about utilisation and reducing the number of vehicles they’ve got. Local and central government will generally admit to having too many vehicles, but they often don’t know how to justify reducing the fleet because managers protest when that starts to happen. You need evidence.”

Smartrak national sales manager of GPS Casey Molloy says there is already a shift toward the safety of staff in fleet cars