How Dashcams Protect Your Fleet
Exploring how dashcam footage enhances driver safety, addresses challenges for smaller trucking firms in implementing safety measures, and emphasizes the importance of safety software and standards in the industry.
Episode 289: This week, we explore how dash cam footage keeps drivers safe. Sam Watts, Safety Supervisor at Meiborg Inc., gives his thoughts on how this technology plays a role in telling what really happens on the road. The last thing you as a driver or fleet manager want is a wrongful lawsuit on top of an accident. Sam recounts real situations his drivers had to face, and how video evidence was able to exonerate them.
The conversation takes an interesting turn as we reveal the challenges that smaller trucking companies face with implementing safety measures and the potential dangers of shirking them. We also explore the growing importance of safety software for fleets, highlighting the benefits of dashcams, E-logs, and other safety tools. Understandably, many drivers don’t agree, especially when it comes to driver-facing cameras. But Sam and Jamie explore some solutions to these concerns.
To wrap things up, Sam recounts his upbringing in the trucking industry, underscoring the importance of elevating safety standards, particularly for smaller enterprises. And what you can do to promote safer working conditions in your company.
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Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine:
You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people. Welcome to another episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report. Today we are going to talk about safety, and I am very happy to have someone who lives it every day, actually works at a fleet and is responsible for safety.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen these nuclear verdicts come out. We’ve seen tragedy on the road. I’m thinking of a couple of the accidents that happened in Western Canada where lives were lost. One of them, it wasn’t a safety issue, another one it was, and the fallout of that was significant. So safety is a real concern in the trucking industry.
And today we’re going to talk about not only safety from the perspective of operating the fleet, but also safety from the perspective of parts and maintenance. So let’s bring our guest on. My guest is Sam Watts. He’s the safety supervisor at Meiborg.
Sam says that he was born into the trucking industry. He never figured out how to escape, so he figured, well, if I’m going to stay, I might as well try to make it safer. Sam, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
Sam Watts:
It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jamie Irvine:
So let’s get the safety talk started. First of all, I want to kind of understand, you’re a safety supervisor at a fleet. So when you look out into these media reports of these nuclear verdicts, over the last few years, what’s been your perspective on the overall trend in safety?
Sam Watts:
Well, that’s a great question because there’s kind of two parts to it, really. I mean, you have the safety side from the trucking companies, and then you have the legal side from the lawyers, and they’re kind of fighting each other a little bit. And the safety’s getting better because we’ve got a lot more technology.
We’ve got the dash cams, we’ve got E-logs I know every driver hates, but we’ve got E-logs and they’re fantastic in my opinion. We’ve got different side cameras now, like our fleet, we have cameras that point back down the trailer so we can see if someone touches us on the side.
You’ve got even backup cameras now. I was just at a conference last week and they were talking about these rear view cameras behind the trailer. So we’ve got, from the safety standpoint, we’ve got our entire vehicle pretty much covered. However, when it comes to the nuclear verdicts and the legal side of things, those lawyers have gotten very good too.
You can have whatever opinion you want of those kind of lawyers, but they are very smart. They’re very smart, they’re very, very quick, and they know exactly what they’re doing. They know exactly what to look for. As a fleet, we’re being better at combating that and covering ourselves, but at the same time, those lawyers are very smart, very quick, and they know exactly what they’re doing.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, that makes sense to me. How has your drivers reacted to all this technology? What’s the sentiment? Are they glad to have it or do they feel like big brothers watching all the time? What’s been the general consensus of your drivers?
Sam Watts:
Most of ’em hate it at first. Not all of ’em, but most of ’em hate it at first until they start seeing the benefits of them. With our fleet, we don’t have cameras facing in at the drivers yet, but I know a lot do, and I understand the reasoning why we just chose not to do it yet, when they finally see the benefits of having that technology, they really do like it.
We just had, one of our drivers got into an accident, not his fault, he got hit and our dash cam showed that the car ran a red light. Well, the driver of that car was claiming that we were the ones at fault. And so our driver was saying, no, I’ve got you on camera saying that you’re at fault. And that covered him. That could have been bad for him.
So they usually will kind of resist it at first until they start seeing the benefit of it, and then they fully embrace it, but not all the time. I mean, sometimes they embrace it right away, but sometimes it takes a little bit to get used to
Jamie Irvine:
What you’re saying, the trucking industry sometimes people are a little slow to adopt new technology and change. Come on.
Sam Watts:
I hope you’re sitting down when I said that.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, man, I just never would’ve heard thought that someone would say that. No, all joking aside, safety is a serious issue. And I think from the perspective of the driver, yes, it might take a while to get used to it, but once you get used to it, those cameras are there to protect you, and I think that’s really important.
Sam, you make an interesting point about the cameras that are actually facing into the cab. I know that there’s some drivers out there with some pretty strong opinions about that. In fact, our podcast director, she was mentioning that her daughter’s dad, who’s a truck driver, has said there’s lots of truck drivers who say, well, if they ever do that, I’m quitting and going somewhere else.
Do you ever think that those cameras facing inward are going to be standard and be mandated across the entire trucking industry? What do you think the future of that use of cameras is going to be?
Sam Watts:
I think standard is a tough one to answer. I don’t know if it’ll ever be standard. I mean, forward facing dash cams aren’t necessarily necessary or standard, whatever you want to call it. But if you don’t have ’em now, you are severely behind the time.
So I can see inward facing dash cams becoming quite ordinary, but you’re exactly right. There are very strong opinions, and that’s kind of to say the least, how a driver facing camera would work in the real world today. And to be fair, I completely see the driver’s point on it. I wouldn’t want anybody watching in my car.
Now, granted, I know there’s legal things like it’s not their vehicle, so we could do it. I get all of that, but at the same time, that is their house. It’s their home away from home. So I understand that. So I think technology’s got to advance a little bit.
I’ve already seen some things where if the truck isn’t moving, if it’s not in motion, the camera doesn’t work. So I mean that technology is already out there, and I think that’s got to be a little more standardized before drivers will say, okay, you can put a camera facing me as long as when the truck stops, the camera stops.
And I get that. And I think that would be more standard. And to be honest with you, as a safety supervisor, I really don’t want to watch that camera all the time. So I think these drivers have this mindset that we’re just going to sit there and watch them drive, but it really, I’ve got so many drivers on the fleet here, I don’t have time to pay attention to you.
The only thing that will happen is if you have an accident or you hit something or a close call, then yeah, we’ll peek in and see what happens. But I think the technology for those driver facing cameras has got to evolve a little bit more or become a little more standardized with their safety or their, I guess safety requirements would be it. But I could see them being pretty common here in the near future.
Jamie Irvine:
And it might just be that it’s a generational thing. The new drivers who are more used to technology may be more accepting of it, but I got to tell you, have an accident and someone says, oh, he was on a cell phone and you weren’t. Right? That inward facing camera can exonerate you from a false claim.
So if you’re doing things the right way and if there’s those different features put in there to kind of protect your privacy when appropriate, then I could see it from a generational perspective, this being a shift that happens relatively soon. But a lot of old school drivers, I just don’t think they’re going to do it. So time will tell.
Sam Watts:
They’re the ones that’ll put up a fight. And again, I understand where they’re coming from, but at the same time, I think they will evolve into becoming the standard. And if you want to keep driving a truck, you’re going to have to figure out if you can live with that or not.
Jamie Irvine:
I imagine from a fleet’s perspective, you’ve got to manage a couple different stakeholders in safety. You want to keep your drivers safe, you want to keep your equipment safe, and you also have a responsibility to the public to keep them safe.
So as a safety supervisor who’s responsible for this, how are you handling this data avalanche that must be coming at you now with all of those cameras, and how are you managing that in such a way that enables you to really take care of all three of those stakeholders in the business?
Sam Watts:
Yeah, at the beginning you said, I was born into the industry, which I was. My father was a driver back in the seventies, and that was the reason he got off the road when I was born, he decided to jump into the office. And so I grew up in the industry. I shouldn’t say this, but I’m almost 40 years old.
So I have seen the industry go quite a ways, and it was kind of nice back in the old days as we call him, the driver would literally just call in on a payphone, say, all right, I’m going to try to make it to Dallas, Texas tonight, and that was it.
There you go. So you don’t know if he’ll make it until tomorrow when he calls in. But now, like you said, we have so much data. I mean, it’s almost overwhelming how much data we have access to.
We could see in real time where the driver’s at, we’ve got things on our trucks here. I can see how much fuel they have in their truck. I could see if their APUs running. I could see how much depth, I could see how speed, if they have a check engine light, I could see why the check engine light is on. I mean, it’s unbelievable what we have just from that component.
Then you take the E-logs and we got all that data coming in, so I could see if they’re over their hours, if they’re coming close to their hours and then you throw in the dash cams on top of that, you throw in the side cams. It is, it’s completely overwhelming.
It’s data that is so needed. And when it comes to protecting the public, I mean, that’s what we have to evaluate is all that data we get in there to make sure that the driver is within his legal limit to drive because they only have a certain amount of hours per day to drive.
So we make sure that they’re in that legal limit. And then we can review the dash cam. Once a week I put out a safety update video to all of our drivers, and one of the components in that is we go over dash cam video from our fleet.
It’s not like that crazy YouTube dash cam stuff you see, it’s real world situations that our drivers have faced. Like this last week, it was one where a car was trying to cut our driver off. And so we walk through that cam footage and I go through it and I say, okay, what would you do in this situation if a car was coming in?
They’re not the professional driver, you are. So I put it on our drivers to say, what would you do in this situation because you’re the professional. And so we are able to review that and they can start thinking about all those situations that they’ve been in and watching this situation and figuring out what they would do exactly.
And that has helped tremendously, just not necessarily because the drivers don’t know what to do, but it just kind of helps reiterate the fact that there’s a lot of crazy drivers on the road. I don’t know if you’ve seen ’em lately, but they are crazy. It seems like ever since covid happened, people got used to the roads being kind of empty and now they’re not empty anymore.
And so they’re getting nuts out there. Again, I don’t know, that’s just my conspiracy theory going, but anyways, but it’s really beneficial for our drivers to review that dash cam footage. And like I said, I can look at their E-logs and say, Hey, you look like you’ve been driving for a while. Are you getting tired? Are you okay?
So all that data, we process all of it. I mean, we put it in our system and we look at it all. And because of that, then we can really make good decisions on where our drivers are at, what they should be doing, and keeping everyone safe in the process.
Jamie Irvine:
And that training component. I think that’s so important. You made the comment, these are professional drivers and they kind of have a higher standard that they have to drive to. But when I think of professional athletes, they practice all the time.
They spend more time practicing than they do out on the field or on the rink. And so if you want to be the best at what you do, then you’ve got to practice. And that training environment where you can look at real world scenarios, that’s just like watching the play by play after a game and evaluating what we could do differently to be more effective and to win.
So I think that’s a fantastic use of that. And I am sure that over time, as the drivers see you using that video footage for that purpose, they start to appreciate the value of it.
Sam Watts:
And that’s exactly what I tell ’em too. I mean, that was how I set it up. Exactly. Athletes watch themselves, athletes watch film of all that stuff to improve their game.
It should be no different. Like I said, it’s not the crazy train hitting the semi-truck or anything like that. It’s cars coming in or what do you do in a rainy situation when all of a sudden there’s a car coming across? I mean, just scenarios like that, real world scenarios.
The trains don’t hit trucks every day, but there’s always cars around there guys, and they’re always acting weird and goofy and whatever. So what would you do in that situation? Just gets them to think how would they handle those situations?
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, I think that’s a fantastic use of that data. So let me ask you something, Sam. How did you get drawn into the safety side of the business? I understand the genetic component of being into the trucking industry.
I never even met my father. And when I was 40 years old, I found my biological father’s family and they asked me what I did for a living. And when I told them, they had this big grin on their face, and they said, your father’s a truck driver for the last 36 years.
So I never even met the guy, and his genetics were passed on to me, and we were both drawn to the same industry. So you got drawn to the trucking industry because of the family connection, but what specifically drew you to safety?
Sam Watts:
I don’t know. That’s a really good question. So I’ve basically done everything in a trucking company. I’ve done operations is my main background. When I got into it, that’s what I first did, but I did IT work in trucking companies.
I did billing for a while. I was the front desk person at a trucking company for a while when I was in high school. I think I’ve done almost everything. I worked in a warehouse. I think I’ve done almost everything in trucking and safety, just kind of, it’s one of those areas that I find absolutely fascinating.
And I know a lot of people don’t say that, but I think it’s so interesting. Yes, it’s a lot of rules and it’s a lot of regulations and things like that, but it’s also something that is so important to a trucking company. Operations is an important bill.
I’m not saying that it’s more important than anything else, but I’m saying it’s often an overlooked aspect to a trucking company just because a lot of people don’t see it as a revenue maker, which not we don’t make revenue in safety, but if you don’t do safety correctly, it’ll cost you a ton of money and it could make your business close. It could have higher insurance premiums.
It could make customers not work with you anymore if you just ignore safety. So I found safety to be a really fascinating department to be a part of, and luckily I found a company that needed somebody and it’s been able to plug in really well, and it’s been going great.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, it is unfortunate, right? Because very rarely is someone going to come and pat you on the back and be like, good job we didn’t kill somebody today. When it all goes wrong, that’s when you get all the attention. So safety can be a bit of a undervalued component of the business, and yet people’s lives literally hang in the balance, your drivers and the public on the roads that are sharing them with those trucks.
So I think that that is something where we need to continue to put the appropriate emphasis. And like you said, it might not make money, but I can promise you if you do it right, it saves a lot of money. We’re going to talk more about how much money it can save exactly. And how maintenance and parts all play a role in safety. We’ll be right back.
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Jamie Irvine:
We’re back from our break before the break. Sam, thank you so much for talking to us a little bit about your experience in the trucking industry, how you are specifically using these new devices and all this extra data that you can get to make your fleet more safe on the road.
We also talked a little bit about the trends of nuclear verdicts and how that’s not going to stop anytime soon. So let’s get down to some specifics. You talked in the first segment about the cameras, about the role that plays, the ELDs, things like that. But what about maintenance? What about parts? What role does that play in keeping a truck safe and keeping the driver and the public around that truck safe?
Sam Watts:
Well, it’s massive. I mean, if you have bad equipment on the road, you’re playing with fire as far as I’m concerned. I mean, we are lucky at Meiborg here that we have a shop right here that we own. So all of our trucks get routine maintenance done.
They get the checks through, all that kind of stuff. So we’re very fortunate here, but a lot of the smaller companies, smaller trucking companies don’t have those shops. And so sometimes they stretch out their maintenance past the point where maybe they shouldn’t. They figure, well, I got a DOT inspection last year, let’s see how far I can get without getting one this year.
And usually it doesn’t end well. So you got to have good equipment if you want to make sure that you’re safe on the road, you got to make sure that your airlines are good, that your brakes are good, your tires are good.
I was part of a company where a front steer tire blew on a guy, and it caught him by surprise, and luckily he didn’t hit anybody else, but it caused his truck to go into the ditch, and yet we ended up having to total the truck. I mean, it’s just because the front steer tire blew. Now, did you run over something?
I don’t know, but I’m just saying, I mean, that’s how quickly it could change. If you have bad equipment or bad maintenance on your equipment, that’s how quickly could change. Just one blown tire could completely take out a truck and trailer, and now all of a sudden you’re out that cost and you’re out that driver. And so it’s very important to make sure that your maintenance is up to speed with these big rigs.
Jamie Irvine:
With that situation, with the blowout, did it cause a rollover?
Sam Watts:
It did not. No. It didn’t cause a rollover.
Jamie Irvine:
But it still totaled the truck.
Sam Watts:
Yep. He went through the median, took out the fence, the catch guard in there, and ended up totaling it out.
Jamie Irvine:
Unbelievable. Yeah, no, and in all the years that I was selling parts, I saw the struggle, especially on the independent service side to provide good quality repairs and a maintenance program.
And to your point on our live program last week, we covered a video from an owner operator who was talking about how basically he drives all week and then he spends Friday and Saturday fixing the truck, and he’s back on the road Sunday.
So depending on what size of an operation you have, it can be a real challenge. Now when your company, you’ve got what, over 170 power units? Is that correct?
Sam Watts:
Yeah, we’re right around there somewhere. Yep.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. And you’ve got your own shops, you’ve got your own maintenance program, so how do you go about specing parts so that you don’t just look at the purchase price of that part, but you look at actually the performance of it and how it’s going to relate to keeping that truck on the road safely?
Sam Watts:
So that comes with having a really good shop foreman and a shop manager, which we do. We’ve got two fantastic guys that really understand how a trucking company works. And I think that sometimes is a key piece too, that sometimes in our own little divisions in a trucking company, we know how our division works, but we don’t know how the whole company works.
And luckily we’ve got guys in our shop that really understand what the owner wants and how he wants it so that they can order the right stuff and find the best value to it, but not going the complete cheap route, not cheaping out on something, but making sure that the product is right, the maintenance is done. And like I said, that all comes down to just really understanding the business and really understanding what the owner is trying to do with the business.
And so like I said, we’ve got some really fantastic guys in our shop that do a really good job and got the right connections. So we get deals and we get the parts quickly, and then we’ve got really good mechanics who know how to put these things together really, really nice.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. You talked about all the data that you collect and through telematics, the things you’re able to see in your dashboards. How are you connecting that data to the maintenance program so that, because like you said, you can’t just work in a silo, you can’t just be like, well, I’m in maintenance and I’m in safety, and those two people do their own thing.
How do you bring it together so that it works in a more complete way to ensure that you’re getting the result you’re looking for with that truck?
Sam Watts:
So we use a software that combines all of that stuff. So all the data that comes in with the dash cam, that e-logs, all that kind of stuff, and maintenance pieces go into the same software. So everything essentially talks to each other, which is fantastic.
Nowadays, like I said about the good old days, nothing talked. We didn’t have software in the good old days, but now we do, which is great. I love it. I’m technically an old millennial, so we love technology, we embrace it, and luckily the technology has caught up to trucking.
That’s always been one of my biggest frustrations in the industry is that I would see all these other industries utilizing technology, but yet we didn’t have it in the trucking industry. It’s like it could be so nice to have this software that could talk to each other, that could watch our maintenance. I could do all that.
And now it’s finally here, and now they’re even introducing some AI stuff, which I’m still kind of leery on, but we’ll give it a shot. Just any sort of artificial intelligence makes me nervous because again, I’m an older millennial, so I still have a little bit of that curmudgeon in me. However, it’s nice that the technology is coming along, and so with us, we have all of our maintenance and all of our safety stuff is all wrapped into one.
So if there is an issue, if I see one of our trucks hit something like we just hit a garbage can the other day, car in front of us swerved out of the way last second, we had no shot, we just hit it, cracked the bumper a little bit, so I can send that video directly off to the maintenance guys or tell ’em like, hey, look at this video.
And they can see like, okay, we’ll need a bumper for that, and then they can order it so that when the truck gets back, we’ve already got it ready to be put on.
Jamie Irvine:
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to put that together. That’s a great way of using that video footage to be able to send to maintenance and say, look, here’s the event that happened. Now, based on that information, you can make maintenance and repair decisions that are equivalent to the severity of the incident.
I don’t know why I never thought about that before, but that’s a great use of it. And I share, so you’re an old millennial. I’m a young Gen Xer. I’m as young as you can be as a Gen Xer and this introduction of AI technology, I actually don’t share the kind of Hollywood dystopian future that is put forward.
When some people talk about AI, I actually see it as an incredible tool. And when you put a really experienced human being with this AI technology in their hands and they use it appropriately, the power of that is going to be unbelievable and it’s going to help us to exponentially increase output.
So I actually hold a much more positive view of that, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can leverage these new tools to our advantage. And the trucking, we always talk about the trucking industry being the backbone of society, and without it, our way of life ends and people’s lives do hang in the balance.
So we’ve got to use every advantage we can to keep these trucks on the road. When it comes to lowering total cost of operation and these maintenance programs that you guys have in place, how does that all come together?
Because as you said, safety is a cost. You got to save the money somewhere. How as a company are you moving towards lowest total cost of operation while at the same time not sacrificing safety?
Sam Watts:
Yeah. Well, that’s been kind of the challenge for the trucking industry for the last couple of years here now is that how do we navigate these high diesel prices, these really low rates, but yet all the parts and the equipment is at, I don’t know if it’s at an all time high.
Jamie Irvine:
Premium price at the least.
Sam Watts:
Yeah. So I mean, that’s been the challenge for the whole trucking industry in general is how do we make sure that we still make money doing this while not putting junk on the road and not pulling junk loads and all that kind of stuff. So it’s been a challenge.
There’s no doubt about that. But the thing, when you have more trucks, we do. We get some decent pricing on some of the equipment that we buy because we buy enough of it. But yeah, that’s a challenge and that’s where the whole company has to come together.
Like we were talking about, you can’t be in a silo. Like operations, you got to know what you’re pulling. You got to know what the rate per mile is, how much deadhead we got going on because all those miles beat up the trucks. So we got to make sure that whatever miles we are driving, we’re getting paid for, and then billing comes in.
We got to make sure we get billed the correct amount. And this is where you really got to start looking at the nickels and dimes too. All of a sudden, are we charging everything for the truck orders not used?
Are we getting all the detention time? Are we getting all the layover time? Those are the little nickels that we need to pick up and make sure that we pick up so that we do run well as a whole operation. But yeah, that’s a great question. I would love to hear other people’s response too. How do you make sure that you keep going when everything’s kind of crazy right now?
Jamie Irvine:
I’ll tell you what, I’ll keep asking the questions and you and your counterparts at your company listen, and hopefully we can find some really good answers. It’s definitely important as an industry, we share these ideas and these thoughts because as I said, the trucking industry is so important to every aspect of society.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of technology as we’ve been talking about, and there’s a cost to that technology. So for example, as we were talking about how you have an integrated system that brings all this data together and includes maintenance and that side of the business as well.
Could you talk a little bit about the cost that’s associated with it, but how really at the end of the day, that cost is completely worth it?
Sam Watts:
Yeah, it really is. And the beauty of the time that we live in now is that technology is pretty cheap. So the program we use to consolidate everything isn’t really that expensive when you break it down per truck.
That’s been really nice because back in the day, I go back in the day again, technology was really expensive and a lot of guys and trucking companies would cut corners on some things just so they wouldn’t have to use all that expense.
But the thing now, we talked about the very beginning with the nuclear verdicts and with all the safety stuff and just all the potential issues that you could have on the road today with all the cars weaving in and out, and the semi-trucks are more expensive than they ever have been.
It’s, in my opinion, incredibly worth the investment to get a good piece of software set up so that you have dash cams.
So you have E-logs. E-logs are necessary anyways, and it’s really not that expensive when you boil it all down. You can find some really good software out there that’s 20, 30, 40 bucks a month per truck, and that would cover you for everything basically.
So I recommend as a safety supervisor that you do spend a couple bucks in the safety department just to set yourself up because I mean, like I talked about before with the crash that we had, that could have been a very expensive ordeal if I didn’t have a dash cam that dash cam cost me, I don’t know, 15, 20 bucks a month to have. But that saved me thousands of dollars on the backend.
So I think at least getting a dash cam, the E-logs and that kind of stuff, it pays for itself. It really will. If you have one incident a year, that stuff would pay for itself.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, agreed. And I was even thinking as you were describing that as the technology on trucks themselves gets more complex, the maintenance and repairs and everything that are attached to that, and then you add in the safety and the incidents on the road we’re talking about if you can wipe out that $300 a year, you’re saving in a second, just a fraction of a second with one poor choice.
Take the time to do the research, get the right solution for your fleet and put it into play today if you haven’t already. So Sam, I really appreciate you sharing that.
Thank you. Kind of as a final question, what is it about your company? So at Meiborg, what is it that created a culture where safety was of high concern and a premium inside of your business?
Sam Watts:
Well, I’m fortunate here because the owner of Meiborg is a driver. He still has a CDL, and he still gets in the truck every once in a while and delivers some stuff.
So I’m fortunate in that the top of the company is a driver, so he’s already got safety in mind. It gets a little more challenging when the CEO or the COO or whatever have never been in a truck before.
They don’t understand, and I’m not calling anybody out, but there are people that they’ve never been in a truck and it’s pretty obvious. And so they don’t know what a safety culture is.
And so then it makes my job harder as a safety supervisor to go to them and say, hey, we need to do this, this, and this in order to make sure that we’re safe out there.
Where I’m at right now, it’s nice because my owner comes to me and says, hey, are you making sure you do this, this, this, and this?
Jamie Irvine:
I was just on the road and this happened. And are we accounting for that?
Sam Watts:
Yeah, that’s exactly. In fact, he’s called me up a couple of times and said, Hey, I just passed one of our drivers. Look at his dash cam, make sure he didn’t do this. Okay, great. So then I look in and it’s always bad when the owner calls you out.
But yeah, it’s fantastic because like I said, I don’t really have to implement, so to say or convince anybody that we need to have a safety culture. It starts from the top, and that goes with anything, any industry, anything. If the top of the food chain, so to speak, is not on board with something, it’s not going to happen or it’s going to be a lot more difficult to make happen.
So if you do work for a trucking company where safety is not top of mind, maybe you need to look at the ownership or the CEO or something like that of the company and say, does he or she have safety in mind? And that’s the person you got to go start with.
Make sure that they have the safety in mind with everything, and then it’ll just trickle down. It really will. Once they get on board, everybody else will get on board. But luckily for me here at my board, we’re owned by drivers, so they know what needs to happen out there, and I just need to make sure it happens.
Jamie Irvine:
And if you do find yourself working in an environment where you’re trying to convince leadership of something, you have to remember that a person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still. So it can be a real tough go if you don’t have that support from leadership.
Sam Watts:
It really is because I’ve been in environments where you do have to convince ’em of something, and it just usually never works out well. So luckily, like I said here, we’ve got drivers at the top and it shows. It really does.
Jamie Irvine:
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvin. We’ve been speaking with Sam Watts, the safety supervisor at Meiborg, Inc. To learn more about Meiborg, visit meiborginc.com.
The spelling of that will be found in the show notes with a direct link to their website. Sam, thank you so much for taking time to come on The Heavy Duty Parts report to give us insight into what it’s like to be a safety supervisor at the fleet level and just to share your experiences. I really appreciate it.
Sam Watts:
I really appreciate it back. This has been a blast. Don’t hesitate to reach back out to me.
