Welcome to article nine of ten in this series on trucking company safety systems. Previous articles have focused primarily on examining parts of a carrier’s safety system and repurposing tools of compliance to better serve their organisation. In this article, I will get into the subject of loss prevention.

My goal in doing this is to explain how loss prevention principles can be applied to aspects of a carrier outside of roles directly related to safety and compliance. Once the benefits of adopting a loss prevention mindset can be seen in all parts of the company, it is easier to see how health, safety, and compliance can be fully integrated into a carrier’s operations.

In the world of safety, loss prevention is the practice of using systems and measures to reduce and prevent the loss of life, health, and property from incidents and accidents [1]. I’ll expand on this definition by including loss of reputation; incidents that do not result in any health, life, or property loss can still cause damage to a business through negative impacts to the business’s reputation. Just think about a social media video depicting a commercial truck with a highly visible company logo driving improperly in a public place without any incident - in such a case, the carrier’s reputation takes the hit, not the bumper.

When it comes to loss prevention and, in general, modern occupational health and safety, Frank E. Bird is considered one of the most influential figures to have contributed to the profession [2]. Many safety professionals today are familiar with one of his greatest works, Practical Loss Control Leadership, and this textbook serves as the first place many people learn about risk matrices, incident investigation methodology, and other health and safety principles [3].

The reason why I am mentioning Bird’s Practical Loss Control Leadership is because of the way the text discusses safety as an organisational objective. There are certainly better texts that can provide carriers with specific guidance for safety-related tasks like collision investigation, but what I find so noteworthy about Practical Loss Control Leadership is that it is not overtly written for safety professionals but is, instead, written for all types of company leaders.

This is an important distinction between this text and newer ones. Nowadays, the safety program at a company is often under the leadership of a safety professional and may be somewhat siloed from the rest of the organisation. I recommend anyone in a position of leadership read Practical Loss Control Leadership because it frames safety and loss prevention principles as areas of knowledge that can benefit all leaders, not as specialised knowledge that only belongs to the safety director.

In the following sections, I will describe how loss prevention and safety principles can be applied to other personnel divisions within a carrier (like operations and management). The purpose of doing so is to show that these different parts of an organisation can work together and operate on similar principles: principles that will not only protect the health and safety of workers and other road users but principles that will protect the carrier from loss in all of its unwanted forms.