At Interactive Driving Systems® we believe that everyone has the right to travel without risking life or health, and the more organisations can do to improve community road safety the better.

Being socially responsible, doing the right things for people, profits and the planet, is an essential part of any business. In recent months we have been strengthening our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program. We try to do the right thing for our customers and channel partners, for the environment, in the community and for our staff. Some examples are listed below:

• For the environment and for road safety in the community we have undertaken a travel survey of our staff, several of whom choose to cycle, walk or use public transport as their preferred mode of commuting and travel to meetings.

• In the community we are applying our core competencies to assist several road safety charities. For example, in the UK we are heavily involved as trustees, advisors and members of Brake, Roadsafe, the Association of Industrial Road Safety Officers and PACTS. We also play an active role in the Occupational Road Safety Alliance, Driving for Better Business and are signatories of the European Road Safety Charter. In the USA we support NOYS. In the EU we have supported the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) Preventing Road Accidents and Injuries for the Safety of Employees (PRAISE) project.

• In the workplace we are committed to the equality and growth of our people across all the continents where we operate.

• To further the scientific basis of our industry we support and undertake a great deal of independent research, much of which is published and freely available. Many examples are shown on the News and Research pages of this site.

• We work with agencies around the world to help provide free or low cost tools and resources to improve occupational road safety. The UK Department for Transport supported Fleet Safety Benchmarking Project is a good example, as is the US NIOSH Global Road Safety for Workers project.

The key focus of our CSR program for 2011 and beyond will be in two areas:

Clients and channel partners such as TNT Express, BT, Arriva, Nestlé, British Gas, Wolseley UK, Johnson & Johnson, Suckling Transport, Royal Mail, Vauxhall, Zurich and Lex Autolease have all won Major Safety Awards. This has allowed them to leverage a range of internal and external outcomes.

As part of the CSR process, we have assisted many different clients with road safety community engagement projects. This is important because recent UK Department for Transport advertising on TV suggests that many road collisions happen close to home, often within the communities in which we live and work. This means that safety in the workplace can also have a major impact on employees, their family and community whilst at home. This is particularly true if family members are allowed to drive company vehicles.

It is therefore important that employees and their families take care at all times whilst using the road and that employers assist them to do so, such as:

1. Over the last five years, BT has made the One More Second module available to all its family members and friends, free of charge as part of its RoadRISK® program. To date over 4,000 people have participated, with an annual re-launch timed to coincide with Road Safety Week.

2. For the last five years Wolseley used Virtual Risk Manager to risk assess all its graduates even though they may not drive on work business - to show their commitment to road safety and high risk young drivers in particular. Wolseley has also been active in promoting road safety in schools, and has undertaken further community initiatives to support Road Safety Week and European Road Safety Day, led by it's Fleet Safety Steering Group.

3. Nestlé has worked with Interactive Driving Systems to promote road safety globally, and as well as its general driver risk assessment, monitoring and improvement program, has successfully rolled out a pan-European road safety game for all its family members.

4. For several years, Royal Mail has used Road Safety Week to raise the profile of driver safety for it employees and their families by including road safety messages with pay slips, touching approximately 170,000 employees and their families. At the same time, managers and safety ambassadors have visited schools to discuss safety with hundreds of children.

More details of these CSR-led community road safety programs are shown in our News section and the following research paper is freely available on request.

Murray W and Watson B. Work-related road safety as a conduit for community road safety. Journal of the Australasian College of Road Safety, May 2010, Vol 21 (5), p65-71.

Please email will.murray@virtualriskmanager.net for a copy.