"As a business we at Hazeldene’s based in Lockwood, Victoria identified a need to have our onsite truck operators to have a baseline level of competence and confidence when operating at our Lockwood Processing plant. Our aim was to ensure our staff were all aware of their role and responsibilities in maintaining a safe, efficient and effective onsite driver conduct.
We needed a baseline standard to encompass the various tasks performed onsite, yet for the evaluation to be general enough to be completed in a timely fashion whilst drawing staff from various areas to undergo this process. We have a large fleet of trucks moving throughout the business and we needed to demonstrate that we as a business were meeting our training obligations and ensuring we are addressing our duty of care to those staff using trucks onsite as well as maintaining the onsite safety and protection of pedestrian traffic moving around the site.
These onsite truck driver evaluations conducted by TDT identified the level of competence of our drivers; it also identified areas where our drivers needed more training / guidance to become competent operators. In addition through feedback with TDT Instructors and their vast experience and expertise in this skill set we were able to pin-point areas we need to focus more training in, particular skills; (such as coupling / uncoupling training) as a measure of continuous improvement.
We will now use this evaluation process as an ongoing measurement tool to determine the competence of our drivers. TDT has shown great professionalism; empathy with our staff and a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of accommodating our wide ranging rostering demands.
The feedback from our staff participating in these Onsite Evaluations has been very positive. Many have remarked how they have gained much more confidence as an operator onsite, that they have had certain procedures, particular the ‘why we do things this particular way’ clarified by TDT Instructors instead of simply accepting it as gospel. As a company we would fully endorse this evaluation process, procedure and training exercise as a very valuable and beneficial operation."
