“Road safety is a real subject, an imperative in terms of HR because all employers must protect their employees. Without forgetting the economic impact, in particular on the costs of restitution”, summarizes Arnaud Renard for Olympus, manufacturer of medical, industrial equipment and photographic devices. This purchasing and general services manager manages 160 vehicles.
The obligation to secure workers, which is incumbent on any head of establishment, is indeed an obligation of result. And its non-compliance can be sanctioned according to article L. 4121-1 of the Labor Code. “The road remains the leading cause of death at work,” adds Nathalie Da Silva, group road risk prevention and eco-mobility manager at Onet. A specialist in business services, Onet has 4,000 vehicles in its fleet and in 2016 signed the “seven commitments for a safer road” of the Road Safety Delegation.
Business leaders involved
In this regard, Nathalie Da Silva recalls that this article R 4121-1 “requires the employer to keep up to date a Single Document listing and evaluating all the risks that may affect the safety and health of workers in an establishment, and actions to reduce or eliminate them. »
“The vehicle is a work tool and drivers become actors in a shared environment, these are concepts that should not be forgotten,” continues Nathalie Da Silva, also a member of the National Road Safety Commission.
“The first task is therefore to regularly check the permits and the ability of employees to drive the vehicles entrusted to them. This is important for all vehicles and particularly for VUs and machinery,” adds this manager.
“Our primary focus remains officer safety. Then, lowering the loss ratio reduces the number of immobilized vehicles and work stoppages”, underlines Hervé Foucard for his part for the town hall of Paris. This head of the municipal automobile transport technical service manages 2,624 motorized vehicles, 322 motorized two-wheelers and 701 bicycles. And Hervé Foucard points out that any mobility plan, mandatory for companies or public bodies with more than 100 employees, “must include actions to reduce travel and emissions, which often leads to thinking about road safety and the ‘eco driving. »
Objective no. 1: secure employees
For some companies, including the smallest ones, road safety is part of their “DNA”, as explained by Carole Blanc, executive assistant and safety manager at L’Atelier du Bois. This SME from Tarn with twelve employees also received the Gold Trophy for “Pros have talent” in 2020, awarded by the Road Safety Delegation.
Sometimes, an increase in claims encourages action. At the head of a fleet of 1,800 passenger cars, including 900 for itinerants, Sanofi has launched a vast program aimed at its itinerants who travel an average of 40,000 km per year. This pharmaceutical laboratory thus strengthened its training policy on road safety five years ago, due to a relatively higher loss rate in France than in the other countries where it operates. The programs, which depended on each department, were transformed into a vast national road safety plan with the aim of halving the loss rate.
Long-term steps…
“More claims, this means a greater risk of fatal accidents, with more absenteeism and costs,” points out Eddy Chaboisseau, head of training at Sanofi. Objective met: the reference rate, ie the number of claims in relation to the number of vehicles in the fleet over twelve rolling months, fell from 45 to 22% in three years.
The most mature organizations have in fact launched actions for many years, like Bayer France, one of the first participants in the Road Safety Club with the Rhône prefecture. At the head of a fleet of 1,070 vehicles, this chemical and pharmaceutical group has just overhauled and harmonized its road safety policy to apply it uniformly to all its employees.
… and results
“We have taken the best of good practices in our various entities for training, driver monitoring, etc. “, relates Marielle Delin, the HSE manager of Bayer France. The results are there. In 2019 (the last representative year due to the confinements), the group recorded a responsible material liability liability frequency, i.e. the number of responsible claims with third-party material divided by the number of vehicles, of 6.14% for a reference national at 8%, and a responsible bodily injury frequency of 0.42% for a national reference at 0.90%. An example to follow.
