When driver coaching fails - and how to get it right

As volatile fuel costs cloud the outlook for UK operators, managers are looking for any savings they can find. When a fleet of 100 vehicles can lose up to £70,000 per year from poor driving behaviours like idling, speeding or harsh braking, changing driver habits seems the logical first place to start. But fuel-efficiency coaching programmes can backfire if drivers think they’re being unfairly targeted. 

If you’ve ever silently despaired after spotting one of your drivers leaving their engine idling in the loading bay line, or slamming hard on the brakes on a junction approach, you’re not alone. Fleet managers know that these drivers might as well be burning £50 notes. You may even have had words with them about reining in these behaviours. Yet nothing seems to get through. 

Even managers who run formal coaching programmes end up damaging morale while doing nothing to check fuel-inefficient driving. This isn’t a reason to blame your drivers, or yourself. Changing ingrained habits is much harder than replacing faulty equipment. It isn't a driver problem or a management problem. In many cases, it's fundamentally a data problem. 

Why coaching credibility depends on context

A headline number on drivers’ fuel use will tell you nothing about their fuel efficiency. Let’s  illustrate this with a scenario that may feel familiar. 

A fuel report lands on a manager's desk, showing the relative performances of two drivers, Sally and Andrew, who cover the same mileage. Sally is burning 15% more fuel than Andrew. The manager calls Sally in, and tells her that she needs to work on her fuel efficiency, so her fuel use can look more like Andrew’s.

Sally isn’t having it. "Andrew starts his routes at 2am, zipping around country roads hauling lighter goods in a two-year-old van. I’m out there at rush hour on the city streets, carrying heavier cargo in a van you bought 15 years ago. Of course I’m using more fuel!”

The manager’s fuel report has told him nothing about any of these variables. He knows his driver has a point, and he has no counter-argument. That working relationship is now tainted. The driver feels she’s been picked on unfairly, and will doubt the credibility of any future attempts to correct behaviour. The manager won’t have any faith in the data he’s working with, and probably won’t lean on it to support any future coaching efforts. Nothing changes. 

This stings because drivers are actually very open to training opportunities. Research shows that 90% of drivers who had been given formal efficiency training would recommend it to colleagues. Drivers want feedback they can act on. It just has to be feedback that takes account of their circumstances. The credibility of your coaching—and of your role as the manager conducting it— depends on whether the underlying data is defensible.

Four reasons your coaching programme might be struggling

Driver efficiency coaching programmes normally fail across one or more of four dimensions. 

1. Lack of timely purpose 

Much coaching is reactive. It might occur retrospectively in response to extreme cases, or it might be a scheduled event every couple of months. Either way, by the time the feedback arrives, the driver has no memory of the specific moment being discussed. The coaching doesn’t make an impact at the point it matters: the hundreds of unconscious micro-decisions throughout a journey that aggregate into fuel-inefficient driving. 

2. Lack of data 

While most fleets will now have some form of telematics installed across their vehicles, much of the data they produce will be of little actual use for coaches. They might surface basic events (harsh braking, speeding, idling) without the contextual detail that would make a coaching conversation meaningful. Managers know something happened, but they don't know enough about the circumstances to explain what the driver should have done differently. 

3. Too much data

Here, we have the opposite problem. Some systems generate so much data that managers can't prioritise it. When every motion triggers an alert, you can’t know what’s truly urgent. Coaching that could have addressed a specific behaviour gets buried under pages and pages of reports.  

4. Manual processes

Many fleets run different telematics systems across their vehicles—dashboard cameras from one provider, engine diagnostics from another. Teams then have to manually stitch together all the relevant data that will support their coaching efforts. But manual processes are fragile processes. They depend on stretched teams following the right steps, every time. Missed incidents and mistakes accumulate into an incomplete picture. 

How trustworthy data changes everything

Each of these failures chips away at the one thing every coaching programme depends on—the driver's confidence that they’re receiving fair feedback. Professional drivers will tolerate a great deal. Being blamed by their managers for things outside their control isn't one of them.

The good news is that plenty of UK operators have cracked this problem, implementing successful programmes that helped to change driver behaviour. Rather than starting out by setting top-down targets, they focused first on repairing the coaching relationship by grounding it in credible, holistic data. 

CLEAN Linen & Workwear know well the problems that occur when drivers don’t trust the data in front of them. Once they fixed this credibility gap with one  integrated telematics solution, drivers became much more willing to engage with a peer-led, targeted coaching programme. In time, this yielded a 14% improvement in MPG, and a 97% reduction in speeding hours. 

Take infrastructure operator Lanes Group. After shifting their coaching style from retrospective discipline to positive reinforcement, their driver attrition rate fell to just 2.7%. In their case, this change was supported by collecting and distributing reliable, context-aware telematics data that added up to an honest picture of drivers’ real behaviours. 

Likewise, food waste recycling experts Olleco built a driver-led coaching culture on top of incontrovertible data that personnel could take seriously. In their first year, this approach helped drivers make better choices throughout their long and busy days, contributing to a 57% reduction in harsh events. 

In all these cases, lasting behavioural change followed on from defensible data, not management pressure. When a driver can see they’re being fairly measured against their own operating conditions, they start engaging with the results—and may even become competitive about improving their score. 

How Eco Driving makes the coaching conversation defensible

Samsara Eco Driving is a new driver coaching solution built on the principle of fairness. Rather than benchmarking drivers against fleet-wide averages, it pulls a whole array of telematics data to evaluate each driver against their actual operating conditions: their vehicle type, load profile, route terrain, traffic density. Each driver’s score reflects what they can reasonably control. This credibility helps managers win drivers’ permission to give honest feedback. 

It’s not just drivers who need nuance. Different organisations have specific operational contexts that influence their fuel use. A refrigerated vehicle needs to run its engine while stopping in order to maintain cargo temperature. This ‘productive idling’ is obviously not the same as a diesel engine running unnecessarily in a yard. That’s why Eco Driving lets you set configurable baselines for your organisation, so that you never inadvertently penalise drivers for doing the right thing. 

We’ve also designed Eco Driving to fill in the gap between action and follow-up, so that drivers aren’t being prodded to correct missteps they’ve long forgotten making. Whenever a driver’s score drops below a threshold, they’ll be sent a Self Coaching session through the Samsara App, personalised to their specific areas of improvement. In many cases, they can complete their coaching in their own time, with less need for management to step in directly. 

With pump prices high and rising, it’s time to inspire your staff to adjust their driving habits. Try our fuel savings calculator to put a number on the savings you could unlock with context-aware coaching.