Why the Best Fleets Take a Bigger View of Safety

March 4, 2026

This month, we’re taking a deeper dive into what the 2026 Best Fleets to Drive For data tells us about how winning fleets build effective safety programs by looking at the bigger picture. That means going beyond regulatory compliance and technology stats and treating safety as a system, not a checklist.

When you step back like that, you can see all of the moving parts and understand how they work together (or don’t).

For years, the industry has tended to focus on specific incidents and take a narrow, reactive approach to coaching and training. The approach has often been to give everyone some basic training, or assume seasoned drivers know what to do in every situation and wait until something happens to provide some remedial coaching or training.

The explosion of technology in the truck, and all of the data that comes along with that, has only magnified the problem and made that easier to do.

Looking at the 2026 Best Fleets data, we see that 100% of finalists have dashcams installed sending lots of data back to the office. Fleets are reacting to that influx of data and we saw that 73% of them have some sort of coaching program and many have programs to assign coaching or training based on dashcam events. It’s great to correct mistakes, but if your coaching program is primarily reactive and corrective, you are missing the real value coaching can provide.

When metrics take over

Technology scorecards have become the dominant way fleets measure safety performance. In many cases, they’ve replaced traditional measures like CSA scores, crash stats, and out-of-service violations.

The risk here is something called Goodhart’s Law:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

In plain language? When you obsess over a metric, you can lose sight of what that metric was meant to improve.

For years, airlines measured success by how often a plane pushed back from the gate on time. Crews rushed boarding to hit the metric only to sit on the tarmac for extended periods due to weather or congestion.

The metric improved. Passenger experience didn’t.

Here’s another example closer to home. If your dispatchers’ metrics are all about on-time deliveries, they may be more likely to pressure drivers leading to safety events, putting your two measures at odds with each other.

In both cases, the metric at face value makes sense. Who doesn’t want their flight to take off on time? And what fleet doesn’t want to do what they can to make customers happy? But chasing those metrics in a vacuum has consequences.

If you’re measuring your success based on a telematics score, it’s only natural that your approach to improving is to react to the events that are driving that score.

There may be nothing wrong with that­—it’s still early days so it will take some more time before the full effects are realized—but it is important to consider the potential negative outcomes of focusing on that specific number above all else. Ask yourself, what type of behavior might I be encouraging the company focuses on this one metric?

Making coaching formal

So, what are the Best Fleets winners are doing to build winning safety programs?

For starters, we’re seeing a shift in how coaching programs are set up and run. Nearly two-thirds have established a formal process for selecting coaches and support them with training and/or ongoing support.

This shows the Best Fleets winners are treating their coaching program as more than reactive, remedial training. They are taking care to put the right people in those seats and making sure that they have training and support to do a job they may not have done before.

This is important because being an effective coach is about more than just understanding how to do the activity you’re coaching on. And an effective coaching program is about more than catching drivers doing something wrong and correcting it. It’s about being able to effectively communicate. It’s as much about listening, showing empathy, and asking the right questions as it is explaining the right way to do something. And it’s about keeping your eye on the big picture of what a successful safety program looks like.

If you’re only calling drivers when they have a hard breaking incident, you might be talking to drivers more frequently, but those calls are not going to have the desired impact. You’re training them, like Pavlov’s dogs, to associate that ring with getting in trouble.

If we look to our driver surveys, the positive effect of this approach is clear:

• 74% say coaching and mentoring improves their skills; and
• 77% agree the feedback they receive helps them improve.

Another signal fleets are investing in coaching and mentoring programs is whether or not coaches are being paid for the extra duties. About 80% of our Best Fleets have formal compensation for coaches and mentors and 40% have a formal pay structure of $100 or more per day.

Drivers (don’t) hate training

There is a persistent myth in the industry that drivers don’t like training. A more accurate statement may be that drivers don’t like bad training. Training that talks down to them, that is generic and doesn’t really teach them anything, or that doesn’t consider their real day-to-day experience.

In our driver survey, 88% of drivers said ongoing training is very important for them to succeed (69% strongly agree). So, they believe in training, but they want training that helps them succeed and actually teaches them something new.

We asked the Best Fleets participants how they were delivering training to drivers and the answers came back in five categories: online, classroom, practical, coaching, and simulators.

Over half of our finalist (57.5%) were using at least three different methods to deliver training and 20% were using four. This multi-channel approach has several benefits. Certain topics naturally lend themselves to one format over another. Using multiple channels lets you deliver the training in the best way. It also allows you to reinforce the messages in different ways.

The different methods also lend themselves to the differing learning styles of drivers. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people are great just reading something. Others prefer to hear or watch it. And some learn best by doing. A mix of methods allows you to accommodate those different styles.

Even within each method it’s important to try and accommodate each learning style, which is why CarriersEdge courses follow a Tell Me, Show Me, Let Me Try It, Test Me instructional design model. This ensures all our courses are effective for all learning styles.

Of all the different methods, online was the most popular with 88% of fleets using it. This was followed by coaching (73%) and classroom (70%). Online has been increasing in popularity for years with the ability to reach drivers anywhere, the cost compared to in-person training, and the overall effectiveness, pushing a lot of that change.

We’re obviously big proponents of online training, but it should never be your only method of training (we only had one finalist for which this was the case).

Like everything else in this industry, human touch matters in training. The relationship is so important and part of creating a strong safety culture is developing those relationships and having those conversations about safety.

It seems the Best Fleets finalists have recognized that.

An area where we do have some concern is the amount of time spent on training after the first year.

There seems to be an assumption in some fleets that once a driver is past their first year, training is less important.

When asked how much training is provided to drivers after the first year, the average was just 16, which is a little less than 90 minutes per month. Now, that is just an average, and some fleets were providing as much as 75 hours per year.

If drivers are saying ongoing training is important to help them succeed, and the majority say the coaching they are getting now is helping them improve, it seems an easy solution to provide more. Especially if you’re using online training and the cost to deliver one course is the same as delivering five or 10 (as it is with CarriersEdge).

To sum up, the fleets we see making the biggest difference from the Best Fleets program are those that take a holistic, big picture approach to safety and training. They are not just focused on solving for today’s issue, but building a program that proactively solves the next three or four problems that may also come up after. Yes, they may still watch dashcam events and provide coaching on those, but they look beyond and keep their eye on a broader program that delivers real value to the bottom line, the culture, and driver retention.