Safety Fist Bump
April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Here’s how you can participate: Click the links below and register to attend a free online training session. Then, put what you learn to work as you continue to promote safe driving behaviors from the workplace to anyplace.
- Wednesday, April 5: Top Things Every Manager Should Know about Safety: Creating a culture of driver and transportation safety is critical to the success of your business. In this session, Brian Fielkow will speak to where – and how – managers should focus their time and attention. He is the co-author of Leading People Safely: How to Win on the Business Battlefield and a former recipient of the CEOs Who ‘Get It’ award from the National Safety Council.
- Tuesday, April 11: Distracted Driving – Work Toward Zero by Making Safety Personal: Senior Program Manager Katie Mueller will focus on driving activities that result in distraction and how building a strong safety culture can reduce risk. She will point to workplace safety policies and procedures and discuss how they can – and do – carry over into everyday life. The net result is your employees and their family members will be safer. Safer employees = lower costs.
Join us to create engagement at your workplace or provide continuing education:
- Offer incentives to coworkers who commit to distraction-free driving: Take the NSC Just Drive Pledge
- Get safety posters, Safety Huddle sheets and Safety Coach cards in our Distracted Driving Toolkit
- Use our one-minute distracted driving video during your next safety meeting (available in English or Spanish)
As infotainment dashboards and hands-free technologies become standard equipment, there is no shortage of distractions fighting for your attention behind the wheel. Distracted driving impacts everyone using our roads, from drivers and bicyclists to pedestrians, workers and first responders. Join the National Safety Council this April to help make sure we all get home safely.
You Mentor, You Inspire
April is Alcohol Awareness Month. Play one of these 30-second videos to start the important conversation on the risks of alcohol consumption: Download them here from the Texas Department of Transportation.
In one of the videos, Richie Griffin recounts his alcohol-impaired driving story:
“I’m back home from college, hanging out with friends, we’re drinking,” he says. “So, we start driving. The road’s kind of windy. The next thing I know, I’ve lost control of the car, and I crashed into a house. … You go from thinking I’m this good guy and everything is working out for me, to all of a sudden I’m a felon. It’s a $30,000 mistake for me and something I still think about and have to deal with every day.”
The economic impact of alcohol-involved crashes in the U.S. is about $70 billion every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
There is no way to measure the cost of losing a loved one or friend. In Texas, more than 1,000 people are killed every year in crashes involving a driver under the influence of alcohol, according to TxDOT. Nationwide, alcohol-impaired driving continues to be a factor in about one-third of all traffic fatalities.
The goal of Alcohol Awareness Month is to provide education about the dangers of alcohol misuse. Learn how you can help others:
Alcohol misuse can impact workplace performance outside of impaired driving. For example, NSC research indicates a typical worker misses three work weeks (15 days) annually for illness, injury or reasons other than vacation and holidays. Workers with substance use disorders miss two more weeks than their peers, averaging nearly five weeks a year (24.6 days). Most of these extra days are associated with illness and injury.
Workers in recovery miss the fewest days of any group – even the general workforce – at 10.9 days.
- Learn how to support workers and end addiction stigma in the workplace
- Get the Substance Use Cost Calculator to find out the real cost of substance use at your location
Then, think back to Richie’s story. He talks about safety today in the hopes of steering others toward a better tomorrow. Use NSC tools to build on that message.