Most fleet safety policies fail the same way. Somebody writes a good one, circulates it once, and nobody reads it again. The policy exists, so the box is ticked, and nothing about how anyone drives actually changes.
A policy is worth having anyway — you need a written standard before you can hold anyone to it, and your insurer will ask for it. But the document is the easy part. Below is a template you can copy and adapt, a plain explanation of what each section is for, and an honest note on the part most policies skip: how you'd know whether it's working.
Name the vehicles and the people. Company-owned vehicles are obvious. The one most policies miss: employees driving their own cars for work. If someone runs a bank deposit in their own sedan, that trip is usually business use, and your business usually carries exposure for it. If your policy doesn't mention personal vehicles, it has a hole in it.
Licence class and current status. How often you check driving records, and who checks them. What disqualifies someone from driving on company business, written down in advance so it isn't a judgment call in the moment.
Keep this short and specific. Vague rules don't get followed. Seatbelts, always. No handheld phone use, including at a red light. Posted speed limits are the ceiling, not a target. Impairment — including prescription medication that carries a driving warning. Passengers. Personal use of company vehicles.
Ten enforceable rules beat forty aspirational ones.
Write this section for someone who has just been in a collision and is not thinking clearly. Short numbered steps, a phone number at the top, and what to photograph before anything moves. This is the section people actually open, usually at the worst moment of their week.
Pre-trip checks, what to look at, who to tell, and how a vehicle gets taken out of service. The important part is the last one: a defect process nobody can trigger isn't a process.
The section most templates leave out, and the one that decides whether the rest is real. See below.
A policy nobody measures is a document, not a program. To measure it you need to know what actually happens once a vehicle leaves the yard — and historically that meant installing hardware in every vehicle, which is why small fleets skip it.
Three things worth measuring, in rough order of usefulness:
Then do something with them. A number nobody discusses changes nothing. The common pattern is a short monthly one-to-one using that driver's own data — specific, recent, not a lecture.
Street Justice runs on the phone your drivers already carry. No hardware, no install appointment, no per-vehicle camera. You get harsh-event counts, posted-limit exposure, and night-driving mileage per driver — enough to run the monthly conversation described above. $10 per driver per month.
Most articles about fleet safety policies promise lower premiums. We're not going to, because it depends on your carrier, your loss history, and your industry, and we have no data of our own on it.
What's fair to say: brokers and carriers commonly ask whether you have a written safety program and whether you can show it's followed. Having documentation and measurement ready at renewal is a better position than not having it. Whether that moves your number is a question for your broker.
Shorter than you think. If a driver can't read it in fifteen minutes, they won't. Detailed procedures belong in appendices; the policy itself should fit on a few pages.
Not necessarily separate, but it must be covered explicitly. Personal vehicles used for business are frequently the least-managed part of a fleet, and often the part where nobody has checked whether the driver's personal insurance covers business use.
Annually, and after any serious incident. An unchanged policy after a significant collision is conspicuous in hindsight.
Every driver, with a dated acknowledgment you retain. Unacknowledged policies are difficult to enforce and don't help you much if anything is ever disputed.
Set up a fleet in a few minutes. No hardware to order, no install appointment.