What is journey risk management and why is it important?

Journey risk management is a systematic approach for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of journeys. It involves documenting the potential risks that have been found and the accompanying mitigation strategies for specific routes, which might subsequently be used to develop a route management strategy.

According to the National Safety Council, accidents cost businesses $9.25 billion per year across all sectors. For businesses, journey management is essential to maintain workplace safety.

In this guide, you will know about potential journey risks and how to do journey risk management with the journey management system. Here is what we have covered in this article.

• Importance of Journey Risk Management
• Factors That Can Pose a Threat During the Journey
• How Can You Plan Safe Journeys with a Journey Management System?
• Tips for Safe Journey Management
• Conclusion

Importance of Journey Risk Management

Road accidents are more common than natural catastrophes. It may cause mild to severe injuries and death in extreme cases. 

Your timely and right decisions can save the lives of your workers. The comprehensive evaluation of travel-related risks reduces the likelihood of your workforce being hurt. Additionally, this improves the mental health and productive attitudes of your team members.

Road traffic accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organisation. In 2019, more than 1,100 people died in road accidents in Australia.

Businesses should do their best to avoid mishaps involving workers travelling for work. Companies, especially in the transportation, mining, and construction sectors, use journey risk management plans and make sure they are carefully planned and followed.

When you prioritise your workers' health and safety, you convey a statement that you recognise and value their services to your organisation.

Never forget that a pleased worker contributes to higher profitability and productivity. When people feel comfortable and secure, they tend to perform well.

Factors That Can Pose a Threat During the Journey

There are several causes of accidents while travelling. Below, we have explained the major causes of accidents.

1. Poor Road Conditions & Weather

Accidents can be emphatically stimulated by the types of road conditions, the topography, traffic, and unfavourable weather. Drivers must be aware of changing situations and modify their driving style correspondingly. Training and teaching can play an essential role in raising drivers' awareness of these concerns.

• Fatigue 

Fatigue is one of the major causes of road accidents. The risk of accidents is more frequent since the driver has slowed response times and reduced ability to see their surroundings, which increases the likelihood of fatalities and major injuries.

Activities, both work and non-work related, can make you tired. Inadequate sleep significantly raises the risk of tiredness. Workload, food, the distance of route, health, and other factors all have an impact on driver attention.

• Distractions

Since most people nowadays use their phones or other electronic devices to find their way around, chat on the phone, or watch a movie while driving, and since lengthy stretches of highway force drivers to fiddle with the radio or other in-car entertainment systems, distracted driving has become the leading cause of vehicle collisions on road trips.

Eating while driving is also a distraction that can result in accidents on long drives. To expedite their journey, many travellers choose to order takeaway rather than have a meal at a table.

Other factors that can cause accidents while travelling includes wildlife on the road, faulty vehicles, and communication failure.

How Can You Plan Safe Journeys With a Journey Management System?

Everyone who has dealt with manual journey management planning knows how time-consuming and error-prone it can be.

The SafetyIQ Journey Management system provides a paperless, user-friendly digital solution, making it possible to view all potential journey-related hazards at a glance, right when it counts most.

SafetyIQ Journey Management not only helps in resolving the critical problem of risk exposure, but also enhances safety, boosts the quality of service provided to customers, and guarantees legal compliance. 

To Learn More About SafetyIQ OR Request a Free Demo, Click here.

Features of SafetyIQ Journey Management

Journey requests, approvals, and monitoring are all included in the SafetyIQ Journey Management, which is completely online. Here is why SafetyIQ can be a good option for you.

• With SafetyIQ, businesses can eliminate paper-based forms and save thousands of hours on manual reviewing procedures. Risk management for Mobile Workers who must operate remotely across several geographic regions is also made easier with SafetyIQ.

• SafetyIQ provides a Real-time Activity Dashboard to monitor scheduled departure from a route plan, progress, and status updates. It helps operations employees to be informed right away while a journey is in process and being tracked. Operations managers can save time by accessing a single platform that displays journey activity and status.

• To report Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), journey management data can be quite useful. Managers can evaluate how many travels were made in a given month, how many of them were authorised and by whom, how many were rated high-risk, and how many were completed according to schedule. 

• Vehicle tracking solutions from SafetyIQ make it possible to automatically monitor journeys and vehicles from the early phases of planning through approval and deployment. System-generated exceptions are reported, and operations managers are immediately notified.

Tips For a Safe Journey Management

Because of the nature of professional travel, many employees drive alone, leaving them even more exposed to the safety dangers described above.

Travelling lone workers can be protected by following proactive occupational safety precautions. Here are some safety tips for safe journey management.

Get the Vehicle Ready

It is important to have the work vehicle serviced and winterized before the weather becomes cold and rainy. That means getting new winter tires, getting an oil change, and, of course, packing an emergency kit.

This isn't only for the winter, though. When travelling in hot weather, take into account comforts like air conditioning and window coverings to block off the sun's glare.

Kit for Emergency Situations

Every vehicle and form of transportation used in business operations should include an emergency safety kit, but this is especially important in the colder months.

Depending on the conclusions of the risk assessment, the items of this kit may vary, but it should always contain things like warm clothing and blankets, canned food, a flashlight, phone chargers, and so on. 

Utilise Technology

Before the development of safety technology and occupational safety equipment, workers and managers had to rely on paper maps and routes to plan out their daily journeys.

Workers who may be travelling in locations where cellular service is not available should be provided with GPS devices that can maintain two-way contact while monitoring their position in an emergency situation.

Workers can also benefit significantly from other forms of safety technology, such as automatic check-in reminders, fall and no-motion sensors, and emergency buttons. 

SafetyIQ is a good option in this regard. Lone workers can benefit from better journey management because of this sort of safety technology's ability to monitor and organise journeys.

Conclusion

Effective journey risk management is very important for businesses. Any business trip, regardless of distance, may be tough on a worker's mental health. The major goal of journey risk management should be to ensure that the employee is secure and at ease when travelling for work. Safe journeys are beneficial for both the workers and the businesses.