Delegates of Goal Ireland, ICRC, OSCE, UNICEF, UNDSS and WHO identify road safety benchmark ambition in virtual workshop.
What value do organisations want to get out of benchmarking? Where does the aid and development sector want to get out of benchmarking?
These were some of the questions that fleet managers answered in the first Benchmarking for Road Safety workshop.
The workshop is part of a project, funded by the UPS Foundation, in which we aim to set up a benchmark process. The benchmark should not only lead to a comparison of road safety data in organisations but more importantly we would like the project to lead to a culture where organisations can learn what organisational differences lead to different road safety results.
In September we kicked off the project with a survey. In the survey we asked questions around benchmarking in general, what organisations wanted to get out of benchmarking and what challenges they saw. Main findings from the survey were:
Respondents see benchmarking as a process to evaluate performance and learn from best in class
Main reasons to participate in benchmarking are: a) To improve road safety performance overall; b) To improve road safety processes; c) To learn what others are doing.
Main characteristics of benchmarking a) To learn from others (in & outside the sector) about success and failure; b) Joint understanding that giving is important as taking.
Main reasons not to participate in a benchmarking project a) Lack of senior management commitment; b) Lack of benchmarking partners.
Respondents want to spend 1 day on a benchmarking exercise
The results of the survey were used during the first Benchmark for Road Safety workshop we held in October. Participants from our member organisations Goal Ireland, ICRC, OSCE, UNICEF, UNDSS and WHO identified a long-term benchmark ambition:
In 2 years from now we will have a set of common benchmark topics. We will use (crash) data to compare. Outcome of the benchmark can be used by country teams to improve their fleet management
and identified the process path that a senior fleet manager would take to discover and learn about benchmarking and finally start using benchmarking.
The target audience, end goal and ‘discover, learn and start using’ path. Developed by participants in the Bechmarking for Road Safety Workshop, October 2020.
In November 2020, a second workshop will be organised in which participants will
Identify areas for benchmarking, benchmarking standards and reference values (suggestions as to ‘what good looks like’)
Collect taxonomies / definitions and come to an accepted taxonomy
Identify specifications for (first) benchmark exercise
If you are interested to participate in this project or if you want to know more, contact Rose van Steijn