The estimated total annual cost of vehicle crashes resulting from using cell phone use is $43 billion, according to a National Safety Council study. Commercial truck and bus drivers can be fined up to $2,750 for each related offense, and the employer is exposed to penalties of up to $11,000.
Developing a strong distracted driving policy may help protect your company and your employees. A recent survey conducted by Traveler showed that 74% of businesses contacted had a distracted driving policy in place.

Erin Bellott, Senior Vice President and Product Manager for Liberty Mutual Insurance, provides the following three steps for risk managers who want to create a safety culture that prohibits distracted driving:

1.  DESIGN THE POLICY

• Before using a mobile device, safely pull over to the side of the road or, preferably, into a parking lot or rest area.
• Let all incoming calls go to voicemail and refrain from reading emails or texts until you’ve arrived.
• Don’t text, call or email any employee known to be driving.
• Enforce that the ban on mobile devices while driving applies to all mobile devices, not just company devices.

2.  COMMUNICATE & IMPLEMENT THE POLICY.

• Require each employee to attend training programs on distracted driving and its causes & consequences.
• Devise a place, such as an intranet site or even a corkboard, and encourage employees to share their ideas for preventing distracted driving.
• Reinforce the message periodically. It is not a suggestion; it is a mandate.

3.  ENFORCE THE POLICY.

• Restate the consequences and penalties for breaching the policy.
• Conduct internal audits of distracted driving prevention and safety culture.
• Track circumstances, such as managers calling employees who are driving, which may lead employees to disregard or ignore the policy.
• Refresh the policy as new practices are discovered.

Supervisors and managers must watch for signs that employees may be overlooking distracted driving policies. Maybe, an increased number of low-severity collisions or incidents while backing up could expose the need for refresher training. Regardless, conducting annual communication campaigns to reinforce the importance of a safety-driven culture is mandatory.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more than 3,000,000 workers suffer a workplace injury or illness each year.

Currently, little or no information about worker injuries and illnesses at individual employers is made public or available to OSHA. Under the new rule, employers in high-hazard industries will send OSHA injury and illness data that the employers are already required to collect, for posting on the agency’s website.

Just as public disclosure of their kitchens’ sanitary conditions encourages restaurant owners to improve food safety, OSHA expects that public disclosure of work injury data will encourage employers to increase their efforts to prevent work-related injuries and illnesses.

“Since high injury rates are a sign of poor management, no employer wants to be seen publicly as operating a dangerous workplace,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels.

“Our new reporting requirements will ‘nudge’ employers to prevent worker injuries and illnesses to demonstrate to investors, job seekers, customers and the public that they operate safe and well-managed facilities. Access to injury data will also help OSHA better target our compliance assistance and enforcement resources at establishments where workers are at greatest risk, and enable ‘big data’ researchers to apply their skills to making workplaces safer.“

The availability of this data will enable prospective employees to identify workplaces where their risk of injury is lowest; and as result, employers competing to hire the best workers will make injury prevention a higher priority.

Access to these data will also enable employers to benchmark their safety and health performance against industry leaders, to improve their own safety programs.

To ensure that the injury data on OSHA logs are accurate and complete, the final rule also promotes an employee’s right to report injuries and illnesses without fear of retaliation, and clarifies that an employer must have a reasonable procedure for reporting work-related injuries that does not discourage employees from reporting.

This aspect of the rule targets employer programs and policies that, while nominally promoting safety, have the effect of discouraging workers from reporting injuries and, in turn leading to incomplete or inaccurate records of workplace hazards.

Using data collected under the new rule, OSHA will create the largest publicly available data set on work injuries and illnesses, enabling researchers to better study injury causation, identify new workplace safety hazards before they become widespread and evaluate the effectiveness of injury and illness prevention activities.

OSHA will remove all personally identifiable information associated with the data before it is publicly accessible.

Under the new rule, all establishments with 250 or more employees in specific industries covered by the record-keeping regulation must electronically submit to OSHA injury and illness information from OSHA Forms 300, 300A, and 301. Establishments with 20-249 employees in certain industries must electronically submit information from OSHA Form 300A only.