Knowledge Base Articles

Does Motor Carrier Safety Culture Actually Work

For motor carriers, “safety culture” is more than just a buzzword, it’s a critical element that ensures the well-being of your drivers, protects human life, and maintains the financial health of your business. At its core, safety culture reflects how seriously your organization prioritizes safety, from the drivers on the road to the executives in the boardroom.

However, creating and maintaining this culture presents its own set of challenges.

Yet, with the right tools and commitment, it’s possible to build a safer, more efficient operation. In this article, we’ll discuss case studies that dive deeper into how safety culture benefits motor carriers, how you can cultivate a safety-first mindset within your motor carrier, and why it matters.

What is Motor Carrier Safety Culture?

Motor carrier safety culture refers to how employees of a motor carrier perceive safety. That includes everyone in the company from the drivers and mechanics to the CEO.

Is safety a number one priority or an afterthought? Are employees thoughtful about safety because they fear being punished or because they have a strong desire to stay safe?

It’s no mystery why creating a safety culture might be important in a motor carrier. In 2022, there was an estimated 160,000 large truck crashes nationwide. That’s not only a problem for your motor carrier insurance claims, but it’s also a huge risk for human life for your drivers, other drivers on the road, and everyone’s families.

Proven through numerous research and studies, improving the safety culture of your motor carrier can not only help reduce the number of crashes and violations of your drivers, but it can also provide them with other benefits as well.

What are the Benefits of Motor Carrier Safety Culture?

Creating a workplace culture that prioritizes safety is crucial for the longevity of your motor carrier. That’s because it can create numerous benefits for your company, including:

Reducing costs: Whether it’s from reducing the need for truck repairs after accidents or lowering your insurance premiums, improving the safety of your motor carrier can help reduce the costs of running your business.

Improving job performance: Creating a safety culture in your business not only ensures that your drivers avoid more accidents, but in turn, your clients’ goods arrive on time and intact. This can help you with higher client retention rates.

Litigation protection: Motor carriers with stronger safety cultures work harder to prevent circumstances that might result in legal action. That includes unsafe driving, truck collisions, and more, which helps protect your business from litigation.

Retaining employees: Employees don’t want to work somewhere that might be dangerous to their health or wellbeing. In a 2021 survey on workplace safety, 41% of respondents said they had left an organization due to unsafe work conditions. Creating a safer work environment can enhance employee retention.

Improving Motor Carrier Safety Culture Case Studies

Over the last decade, there have been numerous studies done on the best ways to improve motor carrier safety culture and its overall results. Some of those studies include:

National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence

The NSTCE conducted a study on Effective Strategies to Improve Safety in commercial motor carriers. Results showed that nine motor carriers had successfully improved their safety outcomes including less severe crashes, insurance claims, and improved CSA and BASIC scores. In this study, researchers discovered a connection between an organization’s safety culture and their actual safety performance.

“The safest companies had strong safety cultures where safety was valued, costs were not a factor when making safety decisions, employees were comfortable raising safety concerns, and all employees “bought-in” to the safety process.”

One of the most effective strategies they observed for creating a safety culture was the dedication and commitment from the top of its organization. This included regular safety meetings and maintaining consistent communication where safety was the main topic.

Overall, six out of the nine motor carriers researched cited safety culture as one of their main focuses for improving their safety. Some notable safety improvements out of these six motor carriers included a 75.6% reduction in preventable crashes, a 45-percentile improvement in CSA Unsafe Driving BASIC, and an elimination of all preventable rear-end crashes and rollovers.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

This U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) report provides a recommendation for how the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) can determine if a new entrant applicant meets safety requirements and how the FMCSA can better prepare new applicants to remain safe as they continue to operate.

What the report found was that creating a safety culture within the motor carrier created a substantially better safety performance.

“A hypothesis grows from this that the ongoing operational safety behavior of drivers is predominantly shaped by their motor carrier’s safety culture. Thus, a motor carrier’s safety culture should manifest itself in safety performance statistics relating to all aspects of operations, including drivers’ safety performance.”

The report goes on to talk about how to measure whether a safety culture can be fostered within a motor carrier. Essentially, measuring how effective proactive, early training and testing of new entrants’ management persuades them to adopt a long-term safety culture.

In the end, the Department of Transportation found that providing motor carriers with early, and proactive safety training, compared with the control group carriers, did improve their safety performance. It also included their performance with inspections, crashes, and overall attitude toward safety.

How To Create a Safety Culture in Your Motor Carrier Business

Here are some tips to help you create a safety culture within your motor carrier:

1. Leadership Commitment

No matter what culture you want to create in the workplace, everything starts at the top. If drivers don’t feel like management cares about safety, it doesn’t give them a lot of motivation to care about it themselves.

Research has shown that companies with strong management commitment to safety experience fewer crashes and better safety outcomes. A study highlighted by the FMCSA found that management’s active involvement in safety programs, such as attending safety meetings and reviewing safety performance, significantly correlates with improved safety outcomes.

2. Open Communication and Reporting

It’s also important for leaders to create an environment of open communication. This allows employees to feel more comfortable reporting safety concerns or near-misses without fear of retaliation. Encourage an open dialogue about safety issues and make sure that feedback is taken seriously and addressed promptly.

3. Ongoing Training and Education

Ongoing training and safety education allows motor carriers to consistently remind their drivers and employees about the importance of safety, not only for business but for their livelihood. It also provides drivers with any updated safety rules and regulations they need to be aware of while on the road.

From the DOT case study listed in the previous section, motor carriers that provided proactive and continuous training to new entrants saw a significant reduction in crashes and safety violations. The crash rate of carriers that received additional safety training was 30% better than the drivers in the control group. Overall, the study showed that all training programs that included follow-up sessions and reinforced homework led to better safety performance compared to those that did not.

4. Monitor Safety Scores and Data

Caring about safety scores and data is crucial for motor carriers because it directly impacts their ability to foster a strong safety culture. Good safety scores demonstrate a commitment to safety, reducing the risk of accidents and enhancing the company’s reputation. Analyzing safety data allows for the identification of risk areas and proactive interventions, leading to fewer incidents, lower insurance costs, and improved operational efficiency.

What are the Challenges of Creating a Safety Culture?

Though creating a safety culture is essential to reducing crashes and improving safety scores, it can pose some challenges to motor carriers, including:

Resistance to Change

One of the most significant challenges in establishing a safety culture is overcoming resistance to change, particularly from long-time employees who may be accustomed to certain ways of operating. It’s possible that drivers with years of experience might view new safety protocols or technologies, such as telematics systems or electronic logging devices, as intrusive or unnecessary.

This resistance can slow down the implementation of safety initiatives and create divisions within the workforce, making it difficult to achieve a unified safety culture. Overcoming this challenge often requires clear communication, demonstrating the benefits of these changes, and involving employees in the decision-making process for new safety policies.

Inconsistent Enforcement

Ensuring consistent enforcement of safety policies across all levels of a motor carrier’s operation is crucial but can be challenging. Sometimes, due to lack of oversight, differences in management styles, or varying levels of commitment among different departments, it’s possible that rules might be applied unevenly. This can create confusion and undermine the perceived importance of these policies.

For example, if some managers strictly enforce seat belt use while others overlook it, drivers may question the company’s commitment to safety. This inconsistency not only hampers the development of a safety culture but can also result in increased traffic violations.

Lack of Resources

Smaller motor carriers often face significant challenges due to limited financial and human resources. This can make it difficult to invest in the tools and programs necessary for fostering a strong safety culture. Unlike larger carriers, which may have more resources and dedicated safety departments, smaller companies might struggle to afford comprehensive safety initiatives.

That’s why it can be helpful for motor carriers to have a tool or solution that can solve multiple problems or provide ample data and information all in one place. This allows them to allocate their budget to one solution versus multiple, helping them utilize their resources more efficiently.

For example, MC Advantage by Fusable, allows you to analyze your CSA score, see detailed inspection reports, and develop safety score cards for your drivers. MC Advantage will even give you a detailed report with the same details that insurance companies review, so you know what needs your attention most to improve your safety performance.

In Conclusion

Based on research conducted over the past decade, it’s been proven that a strong motor carrier safety culture leads to less crashes, less violations, and improved safety performance. This can provide motor carriers with ample benefits, including lowered insurance costs, employee retention, and litigation protection.

Though fostering a safety culture in your motor carrier business might come with challenges, using the right tools and resources can help alleviate the stress. Powerful data products like MC Advantage can provide you with the information your motor carrier needs to better monitor its current safety performance and find ways to improve it.

Enhancing Efficiency While Maintaining Accuracy in Commercial Insurance Underwriting

As an underwriter, you know it’s important to do your work well, but you know it’s equally, if not more important, to do your work efficiently. The quicker you can get your risk assessment and analysis done, the faster you can get your quote to the customer and bind the policy. But that means you have to balance the upholding of rigorous risk assessment standards while streamlining your workflow to meet the demands of your business.

Is that actually possible?

This article explores some current challenges in the underwriting process and different ways you can boost your underwriting efficiency, while maintaining or even improving your risk assessment accuracy.

Challenges in the Underwriting Process

Loss of Focus

An Accenture underwriter survey reported that up to 70% of underwriters’ time is spent on activities other than underwriting. According to their findings, 40% of their time is spent on administrative tasks, 30% on negotiation and sales, and the remaining 30% on actual underwriting. Over the next five years, Accenture estimates that this inefficiency will result in an industry-wide loss of roughly $160 billion.

Data Overload

Compute power and data volumes are rising significantly as the proliferation of connected devices and their transactional activity continues to accelerate. In fact, according to Exploding Topics, 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone. The paradox for the commercial underwriter is that while the availability of insights is rising, the ability to consume and make sense of it is deteriorating. Simply put, the underwriter is growing richer in data and poorer in actionable insights.

Because of this, underwriters often face data overload, grappling with an immense volume of information from multiple sources, such as financial statements, market reports, and customer data. It’s a struggle to quickly filter out the noise and pinpoint what’s necessary for adequate risk assessment.

But the amount of data that underwriters use is still necessary to accurately price risk and apply rates. Especially since over the past ten years, underwriters have started to feel less confident in the quality of their work. In 2013, Accenture sent out a similar survey where 63% of underwriters said their processes and tools were “superior”. But in their most recent survey, that number dropped to 46%.

Policyholder Demands

Underwriters feeling less confident in their ability to do their job well can create other challenges, like misapplying rates or mispricing the risk. When this occurs, it can develop into a tense working relationship between underwriters and policyholders. According to a World Report Series Property and Casualty Insurance report, 42% of policyholders find the underwriting process complex and lengthy and 74% of commercial insurance buyers expect greater pricing transparency.

But if underwriters aren’t confident in the accuracy of their risk assessments, how can they reassure their customers?

Let’s start by taking a closer look at some of these challenges and the different ways you can improve the efficiency and accuracy of your underwriting.

Improving Your Underwriting Efficiency and Accuracy

Here are some solutions and practices to address the challenges mentioned above:

Cutting Out Unnecessary Tasks

With most of their focus elsewhere, underwriters are finding it hard to prioritize their primary tasks. If you’re looking for ways to improve the efficiency in your underwriting, one of the initial steps is to improve the efficiency in your other daily tasks, or find ways to eliminate them altogether.

Technology offers one of the most effective solutions for this challenge. There are numerous products currently available that can streamline the administrative tasks of underwriters, but a lot of companies aren’t utilizing them.

An article from Risk and Insurance discusses how underwriters, when asked how new technology has impacted their work, said they saw improvements in quoting and selling, and evaluating risk and pricing. However, new technology has had much less of an impact on non-core/administrative tasks. In fact, almost two-thirds of respondents said that since they incorporated new technology into their day-to-day tasks, their workload has actually increased.

Though it’s unclear why that may be, whether it’s from technology with poor data or tools without API integration, what is clear is that ignoring the time-consuming administrative tasks isn’t making the jobs of underwriters any easier.

Using the Right Data Tools

Underwriters have frequently expressed concerns in the past that incorporating new technology into their processes has often had the unintended effect of increasing their workload. Additionally, they continue to experience data overload.

Does that mean underwriters should avoid new technology and data products altogether?

Absolutely not.

For instance, let’s say you’re trying to value a policyholder’s commercial truck. You’ve looked up the original cost new (OCN) of the truck, but found that it is an incomplete cab and Chassis, so you know the OCN is underreported because the value doesn’t account for the Body installed on the back of the truck. Now you have to somehow find the value of the truck body to incorporate that into the value and the risk assessment.

What does that entail? Using a completely different software or database? Complex calculations? Whatever the case, you’re staring down the barrel of data overload and a bigger workload thanks to the current data tools you have.

But, if you were using a more powerful data solution, such as the Risk Intelligence solutions powered by Fusable, you could take advantage of its TruckBody IQ® calculation. This solution provides you with an instant estimated OCN of a completed truck, including the value of the truck body. This increases the accuracy of your quote during the underwriting process while mitigating risk for the insurer.

Using data products that can help you accomplish more while maintaining accuracy is one of the best ways to avoid data overload while increasing your efficiency. If you have a ton of data products or databases that all require their own login and separate use, it’s going to hinder your ability to do your job quickly and accurately.

Improving the Insurance Customer Journey

Improving the insurance customer journey involves recognizing the diverse pain points each customer may experience. It’s crucial for underwriters to identify these pain points, whether they stem from complex policy language, lengthy claim processes, or even the price of the policy. Recently, Publicis Sapient surveyed 250 policyholders who interact directly with their insurers. Specifically, they asked why policyholders decided to switch insurance companies.

In their response, 70.1% of policyholders cited pricing as the reason. As you know, a high price isn’t something that an underwriter can always control. Often, the poor compliance scores of a customer cause their risk to go up, which causes the price to go up.

If you notice this with some of your customers, the first thing you should do is warn them about their current risk. Something they might not realize is that their lack of insurability could reduce their options in the insurance marketplace, and possibly cause them to pay exuberant costs.

But going above and beyond can not only improve your customer retention, but also lower the amount of risk that your insurance company is taking on. For instance, Fusable offers an affiliate marketing program for some of its products that allow your clients to use them as well.

This gives them the data to identify areas of risk they can reduce themselves, increasing their own insurability and reducing their insurance costs. And because it’s the same data used by insurance companies, it can also help openly communicate with your customers to improve transparency with their policies.

Future Trends of Underwriting Optimization

It’s smart to stay up-to-date on future trends and developments of underwriting optimization, so you can ensure your efficiency and accuracy is maintained. Here are some trends to keep an eye out for:

It seems you can’t open a social media app or news site without seeing some mention of AI. In fact, a lot of insurance companies have already adopted it into their workflows. In 2023, a survey conducted by Conning noted that 61% of respondents in the insurance industry had either implemented or were in the process of implementing AI into their workflows, and in 2024, that number jumped to 77%.

The three main areas of insurance that the survey examined included risk control and pricing, operations and claims process, and sales and underwriting. For underwriting specifically, AI algorithms are being used to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the underwriting process.

That includes analyzing vast datasets, identifying patterns, and making correct risk predictions. AI can also help to streamline repetitive tasks, allowing underwriters to focus on complex decision-making and strategy instead of non-core or administrative duties.

And the adoption and inclusion of AI isn’t slowing down. The size of the global artificial intelligence market for insurance was estimated at $4.59 billion in 2022. However, it’s predicted to continue to grow, hitting a whopping $79.86 billion in 2032. That means, if you don’t already use AI in your workflow, chances are you will within the next few years.

But don’t fret. AI will never replace underwriters altogether.

The last thing an insurance company wants is a fully-automated underwriting process that starts handing out bad policies. Underwriters will remain essential because of their critical reasoning, which is key in interpreting nuanced risk factors that AI might miss and ensuring quality assurance of all policies. Even as insurance companies continue to adopt AI into their workflows, human expertise will always be critical in handling exceptional cases, maintaining ethical standards, and providing a more personalized touch.

Blockchain Technology

If you’ve heard of blockchain technology, you might identify it with cryptocurrency, but other industries and entities are becoming more interested in its use. That’s because blockchain technology can create secure and transparent records of transactions and claims. This decentralized system ensures that data integrity is maintained across all parties involved in the insurance process. But it also can contribute to a more efficient and optimized underwriting workflow.

That’s because, using blockchain technology, underwriters can automate different tasks, such as identity and document verification. It can also help execute and manage smart contracts. These contracts can automate various calculations and tasks for underwriters, including premium calculations, policy issuances, and even claims settlements. It sounds similar to AI, but blockchain technology provides additional security to the data it uses by running continuous checks against copies of itself to ensure the data is never compromised or changed by external parties.

Telematics and IoT Integration

Telematics and Internet of Things (IoT) integration are set to revolutionize underwriting by providing real-time data on insured assets. Devices such as GPS trackers in vehicles or smart sensors in homes will offer continuous monitoring, enabling underwriters to dynamically assess risks and tailor policies to individual behaviors and conditions.

For example, let’s say you’re analyzing the risk of a motor carrier (MC). Using telematics data, you can better understand the MC’s asset utilization. That includes assessing the vehicle’s usage, where it’s hauling its cargo, and how often it crosses state lines. You can even use telematics to better understand driver behaviors and how safely they operate their vehicle. This gives underwriters the tools they need for more accurate premium pricing and proactive risk management.

Fusable is currently in the process of integrating telematics into our existing analytics tools. Using this technology, we can provide a deeper level of data to perform more adequate risk assessments. We are currently planning to implement these changes to some of our analytical tools by late 2024.

In Conclusion

Enhancing efficiency and accuracy in commercial insurance underwriting is both essential and achievable by using advanced technologies and updating traditional workflows. The current challenges, such as excessive administrative tasks, data overload, and rising policyholder demands, are forcing underwriters to take a strategic approach to improve or optimize their processes. By making gradual changes and taking advantage of automation software and powerful data tools and solutions, such as those available through Fusable, underwriters can significantly boost their productivity and precision.