Case study: changing perceptions of the value of driver safety

With the continuing growth of online shopping in the UK, there has been an equivalent rise in the numbers of van fleets to complement demand. This steady increase has led to an acknowledged need in the industry sector to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of at-work road safety initiatives. Key to the design, implementation and evaluation of such initiatives, and to creating a workplace culture of driver safety, is a greater understanding of the behaviours and attitudes to risk of professional van drivers and how to monitor, assess and consider ways of influencing these proactively and effectively. The current study sought to investigate driver attitudes and behaviours to risk within a major retail online delivery service in which I am employed, Tesco Dot.com, as part of a wider set of interventions designed to inform the company workforce of developments, policy and practice in this area. Researching from an insider practitioner-manager perspective, I used a longitudinal case study approach to explore the role of innovative technologies for driver safety, allied with concurrent workforce development and training programmes. Using a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis, I combined qualitative data from staff interviews and quantitative data from internal data sources, together with reflections on my changing role and developing influence within the team, to build up a rich picture of the challenges of fostering innovation and change from the inside, particularly in a discrete part of a complex, rapidly changing retail industry. As a result of ongoing evaluations, I formulated a number of medium and longer-term recommendations about the early implementation of company strategies, including recruitment and retention for drivers, strategies for addressing barriers and enablers to the rollout of proposed technologies, and formulated proposals for organisational reconfiguration to embed a culture of driver safety more securely within the company workforce.