Road Safety At Work Week is a time for BC workplaces to focus on improving road safety in their organizations. Each year, a different aspect of workplace driving is highlighted and tools, resources, and online courses are made available to help you understand the responsibilities you have as a business owner.

This year’s topic is: employees who drive their own vehicles for work. Whether a fleet van or personal sedan, if your employee is driving for work, you have the same road safety responsibilities.

A Vehicle is a Workplace

If a vehicle is used for work, it is a workplace and that means you, as an employer are responsible for your employee’s safety when they are behind the wheel.

This means you must:

• Confirm employee-owned vehicles are fit for purpose, regularly inspected and properly maintained.
• Provide employees with instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure their safety.
• Confirm employees know and follow company safe driving policies and procedures.

But you’re not the only one with responsibilities. Your employees must also be accountable for how they drive. They must:

• Know and obey applicable traffic laws.
• Take steps to ensure their safety and the safety of their passengers.
• Follow company safe work policies and procedures.

An employee must also make sure their vehicle is licensed, insured, operated and maintained in accordance with the Motor Vehicle Act and its Regulations, and other statutes if the vehicle is used for commercial purposes.

Ways You Can Participate in Road Safety At Work Week

Road safety is like many skills, it needs to be reviewed and updated, every once in a while, to ensure the safety of your staff and others. That’s why Road Safety at Work Week is so great. It offers you lots of opportunity to get involved:

• Test Your Knowledge: Understand your legal responsibilities to keep staff safe when they are driving for work, even if they are driving their own vehicle.
• Create a Road Safety Program: Review and update your driving policies, practices and procedures and create a plan of action.
• Educate Your Staff (And Contractors): Test your employees knowledge about the risks associated with work-related driving and the steps your company is taking to keep them safe when they are behind the wheel.
• Print or download the Road Safety At Work Week poster and infographic and share them with your workers.
• Get Social and show your commitment to your employees by sharing how you are participating in Road Safety at Work Week. They even have some sample tweets and posts to get you started. And don’t forget to follow @RoadSafetyAtWork
• Conduct safety checks of the personal vehicles your employees drive for work and review their insurance coverage and driving records.
• Check out other ways to participate.

Why is Road Safety Important?

In BC, motor vehicle crashes continue to be the leading cause of traumatic workplace deaths. Twenty workers a year on average are killed and another 1,260 are injured and miss time from work due to motor vehicle crashes while driving for work. (Source: WorkSafeBC, 2011 to 2015).

While 75 % of BC businesses understand that they have legal responsibilities for employee safety when they drive a company vehicle, only 59 % understand that their legal responsibilities extend to employees who drive their own vehicles for work. (Source: Road Safety At Work Employer Survey March 2016)

Road Safety at Work is an initiative of WorkSafeBC and the Justice Institute of BC to promote work-related road safety. Follow it on Twitter @RoadSafeAtWork and use #RSAWWeek to join the conversation.