This article was originally published on SMBTech and is republished here with permission.
Source: Safety Without Surveillance: Three Fleet Safety Fundamentals
This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one: Your Drivers Aren’t Wrong To Be Suspicious Of Fleet Cameras.
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Cameras are great at what cameras are great at. They capture driver behaviour, provide evidence when incidents are disputed and support the coaching feedback loop that shifts performance over time. Fleet operators that have deployed them thoughtfully get real safety and commercial value out of them, and the first article in this series covered both the case for the investment and the conversations that need to happen for a workforce to accept it.
But driver behaviour at the wheel is one specific safety problem among several, and a significant proportion of what actually goes wrong for field workers has nothing to do with how they drive. For instance:
- A worker is stranded in an area with no cellular coverage and can’t call for help.
- A lone worker doesn’t return from a site visit and nobody is sure where they were.
- A duress alert is triggered and goes to an inbox that doesn’t get checked until Monday.
These are fundamentals of worker safety, separate from the camera conversation and worth getting right regardless of where an organisation lands on driver monitoring. This piece covers three of them.
Get Them Connected
If your team operates outside major metropolitan areas, the assumption that they can reach the office or emergency services from any location is worth testing rather than just hoping for. Mobile coverage across regional Australia is patchier than most planning documents acknowledge, and a worker in difficulty who can’t make a call is in a fundamentally different situation to one who can.
Cellular boosters improve reception on existing networks and remain a practical starting point for fleets in fringe coverage areas. Satellite connectivity, including Starlink, has dropped considerably in cost and now provides workable coverage where cellular doesn’t reach. UHF CB radios remain relevant for fleets on mine sites, large agricultural operations or other environments where they’re the established local channel.
For the most remote operations, satellite phones and personal locator beacons are worth knowing about. PLBs are well proven for genuine emergencies and require no subscription, but they’re single-purpose devices that don’t integrate with safety workflows. Sat phones bridge some of that gap but tend to be expensive and disconnected from enterprise systems. Horses for courses, and the right mix depends entirely on where your people actually go.
Know Where They Are
Knowing where vehicles are is the second fundamental and arguably the most cost-effective safety investment available. GPS tracking devices run between $150 and $300 per vehicle with subscriptions from around $10 a month, which makes the case for full coverage difficult to argue against on cost grounds.
Worker location is a separate problem that starts the moment a worker steps out of the cab for a site visit, an inspection or any task that takes them away from the vehicle. Most modern lone worker apps handle this, with location either updating continuously during the shift or shared only when an alert is triggered. The latter is the better default for most operations because it addresses the safety case without creating a continuous-monitoring privacy concern.
Know They’re Ok
The third fundamental is the simplest in concept and often the weakest in practice. Knowing that a worker is ok, particularly one working alone or remotely, needs a system that prompts them to confirm at sensible intervals, escalates automatically when they don’t and routes the right alert to the right person when something is wrong.
Duress buttons, both vehicle-mounted and portable, give workers a direct line to the people who can respond without relying on a phone call they may not be able to make. The value isn’t in the device but in the response workflow on the other end, because a duress alert that triggers an email to a shared inbox is very different, operationally, from one that routes to named responders with a clear escalation protocol and a full audit trail.
Scheduled check-ins follow the same logic. The capability that matters isn’t the ability to record location, which most apps already have, but the ability to act when something doesn’t happen rather than just when something does. WHS regulators across most jurisdictions have made clear that “we tried to call them” is no longer sufficient evidence of duty of care, and a working check-in system is the most direct way to address that.
Horses for courses
Cameras and behaviour monitoring solve one specific safety problem and solve it well. The three fundamentals above solve a different set of problems and are independent of what any organisation decides about monitoring tools. Some operations will run both. Some will run the fundamentals while the camera conversation is still being worked through. Some will decide cameras aren’t the right fit for their operation and leave it at that. None of those are wrong answers.
What they have in common is that the data coming out of the stack only delivers its full value when it flows into the workflows where the right people can act on it. Routing fleet and worker safety data into the tools the rest of the business already uses, with alerts going through Microsoft Teams, audit trails in SharePoint, and trends in Power BI alongside other operational reporting, is what makes the difference between a collection of tools and a working safety programme.
Paul Maybon is Chief Product Officer at Zetifi
