CVOR Podcast

Due Diligence, CVOR Podcast

June 16, 2022 Chris Harris, Your CVOR Guy Season 1 Episode 5
CVOR Podcast
Due Diligence, CVOR Podcast
Show Notes Transcript

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Welcome to the CVOR podcast. This podcast is made for those a CVOR operators, such as landscapers, electricians, towing, operations, bus companies, trucking companies, anyone who has a CVOR wants to know everything that there is to know about operating a CVOR company. I'm your host, Chris Harris. Thanks for joining me every week On this week's podcast, we're talking about due diligence. Yes. Due diligence. This is part of the MTOs CVOR safety manual. So let's see if we can get through this pretty quickly in the CVOR safety manual, they are always talking about due diligence. Due diligence is Tom is referring to the actions that may happen as a result of a mishap. So what kind of a mishap? This could be a worker's compensation where one of your employees or operators gets injured by work, or it could be they got injured or worse, of course, in a vehicle accident. This is what you're worried about is the courts and the lawyers and all the procedures that they're going to be looking at to see if you follow them. So you must have a few things in place to successfully defend yourself in a due diligence situation. You need to have written policies. And yes, this is all outlined in the CVOR MTOs safety manual. They tell you that you must have written policies, written procedures, and they talk about the reasonable person. What is a reasonable person test a person that is operating a company must act reasonably and must be able to defend this in court. And to say that, Hey, I did what all my other people, with my knowledge, my experience operating a company such as mine would do in this situation, it's called the reasonable person test. And it's very difficult. Sometimes if you are not doing it correctly, to prove that you were a reasonable person. Well, we're always talking about the courts. We're always talking about lawyers. And of course their job is to make company owners look bad when there is a situation. And that's what we talk about here in the CVOR podcast, how to defend due diligence. Well, the first thing is you need to know the highway traffic act and all of the other regulations that you are operating under. And then you must also convey the knowledge to your employees, to those people who these regulations affect. You must educate them and you need to be documenting that education. Of course, you need to be hiring qualified personnel. This could be qualified dispatchers. It could be qualified electricians, qualified payroll, people, and of course, qualified drivers or operators of CV, oh, our vehicles. You've got to hire qualified. And once you've done that, you've hired qualified people. You need to prove that they were of course qualified. And the only way to do that is you need to be documenting, documenting, documenting document, document document. A friend of mine, a lawyer once told me about the three PS and the three P's are policies, procedures, and proof. And he asked me, Chris, what do you think? Which one of the three PS is most frequently missing when I have to defend a company in court? And of course it was proof. If you said proof, you are absolutely correct. The proof is often the one that is missing and it's proof of things like training. I mentioned that you've got to educate your staff and, and your CVOR operators in the highway traffic act. Well, where is the documentation to prove that you train them and that you told them to do certain things you need to be managing your employees and operators. Well, where's the proof that you are managing them. And part of managing would be to say, Hey, I told them not to do this. So I told them not to speed as an example. Well, how, how did you tell them, do you have it in your policy manual? Did the operator sign for the policy manual? Did you train the operator on the negatives, on the things that can happen when they do speed? So these are the things that the courts would be looking for in your files. You need to be managing. And then if an operator does commit an offense of some sort, and let's continue with the speed, let's say the operator of your CVOR vehicle did have a speeding ticket. Well, now you need to discipline them. You need to say, Hey, this is against company policy. It's also breach of the highway traffic act. And so sign this warning letter saying that I've disciplined you. And by the way, let's do a training course. And then of course you document that your driver did the training course. That's how you would handle discipline, documentation, improve, make sure you are keeping excellent. And I do mean excellent records. You've got to establish a written safety program and you gotta be able to prove that it was implemented. For example, you got to have written policies and documentation that training actually takes place. So make sure you have your records up to date. Speaking of training, you need for a training situation. If I was doing the training, for example, I give my clients a copy of the PowerPoint slides. I get all the drivers to sign an attendance sheet, and I also make up a quiz for all of my training programs and each person that attends the training program completes the quiz. This would be good documentation of the training. So in summary, make sure you document, document, document, due diligence to defend you in a due diligence situation. It requires that you have all the written policies, procedures, and activities in place, and that you can prove that you would here to these policies that you disciplined your operators and that you gave them adequate and complete training. All right, that's it for this week, Chris Harris safety dog on the CVOR podcast. And as always, just before we go, let me do a question. If you're a applying for your CVOR test, listen up. Here's the question. Communication is the key to the success of a safety management system. What elements will help operators ensure good communication. So again, the question communication is key to the success of a safety management system. What elements will help operators ensure good communication reporting systems to management and train staff, document training, incident, collision convictions, et cetera, set up a tracking system to find records and scheduled maintenance and training or all of the above. I believe it's all of the above. Let's click it. And Dave is correct. All of the above is the correct answer. Thanks Hey, thanks for sticking with us. This is the CVOR podcast. We talk about everything CVOR related. If you're getting value, please click a like and subscribe and don't forget about our contest. Leave me a comment. And if I choose your suggestion for content on another episode, I will be thankful and give you a access to the CVOR driver file course. All right. So leave me a comment with suggestions for topics. All right. That's it for this week safety dog and the CVOR podcast is out.