Mike Fackler, Technical Director of Transportation for Travelers Insurance, joined FreightWaves’ Malcolm Harris on What the Truck?!? to break down why the solutions to distracted driving don’t start with the driver.
According to Fackler, the scope of the problem is bigger than a phone in someone’s hand. Yes, cell phones remain the dominant distraction on the road, but tight schedules, communication demands, and the operational realities of running freight make the picture far more layered.
Federal regulations already prohibit CMV operators from using hand-held mobile devices while driving — a rule that carries significant fines and penalties for both drivers and carriers. But Fackler argues that compliance alone isn’t enough.
“When you think about distractions as a whole, you have to think about all the responsibilities, all the things that drivers are trying to balance,” Fackler said. “With tight schedules and communication demands, they’ve got multiple responsibilities. They’re trying to juggle all these things at once, and they’re trying to safely get to where they’re going.”
Regulatory compliance and internal discipline are essential — and legally required — starting points. But approaching distraction as a systemic condition rather than an individual failing means going further than enforcement alone to build a culture where safe behavior is the norm, not just the rule.
The root of the problem, says Fackler, sits in the C-suite and in dispatch offices long before it lands in the cab of a truck. When a distracted-driving incident occurs, the default response tends to focus on what the driver should have done differently. Fackler argues, that’s looking at it backwards.
“Distraction is just a symptom of a bigger issue,” Fackler said. “If we want to address distracted driving, we have to step back and ask ourselves what kind of culture we’re building and what behaviors we’re reinforcing every single day.”
That question applies across every level of an organization. There’s often a direct line between leadership behavior and fleet outcomes, and the small, daily decisions made by executives, managers, and dispatchers are what ultimately shape how drivers behave on the road. Leaders who take calls while driving, fire off texts from behind the wheel, or dial into meetings on the move are, in effect, establishing the unwritten rules of their organizations.
“It’s the small everyday decisions that your culture gets locked into,” Fackler said.
Accountability, Fackler says, is a principle that has to be universal in order to be meaningful. He pointed to a lesson from one of his former football coaches that has stuck with him throughout his career.
“Accountability is the ultimate form of leadership,” Fackler said, crediting the coach. “Expectations cannot be implied and they cannot only be spoken.”
That philosophy extends to how organizations handle their best performers. Fleet leaders should understand that tension well.
A veteran driver with a clean record and years of loyal service gets caught using a phone on the road. Do you enforce the same consequence you’d hand down to a first-year driver? Fackler said the answer has to be yes, every time.
“You can’t have different rules for different people, because when you do that, things start to break down,” he said. “You can’t make an exception and say, ‘Well, this is one of our best drivers.’ Allowing employees off the hook and failing to enforce your expectations is what undermines your safety culture and leads to the problems that we see.”
Drivers are perceptive. When leadership says one thing but does another, or when star performers play by different rules, the message that reaches the driver’s seat is that distracted driving is tolerable.
“When you have an organization that lacks a clear strategy and clear policies around expectations for distracted driving, you’re effectively telling drivers that staying connected and staying distracted is more important than staying safe,” Fackler said.
He offered a simple, practical example of what right looks like at the leadership level: “Leaders should say, ‘Hey, I’ll call you back when I’m parked’ instead of responding in the moment.”
There’s a broader picture beyond individual incidents to the long game of organizational safety culture. Perfection isn’t the target, according to Fackler. Progress is.
“The goal should be to build culture over time and try to enforce the expectations that we do the right thing even when no one’s watching,” Fackler said. “It’s not one single instance that defines an organization, but it’s the thousands of small decisions that happen up before it.”
Fleet operators, then, have a challenge and an opportunity simultaneously. Distracted driving isn’t going to disappear overnight. The technology, the communication demands, the operational pressures that create distraction are only intensifying. What can change is how organizations position themselves relative to those pressures. Leaders are responsible for whether they treat distraction as an inevitable cost of doing business or as a cultural problem they have the power to address.
Fackler left leaders with three questions to pressure-test their own organizations: “Companies need to ask themselves: Do we have clear policies around distracted driving? Are the expectations communicated and are they reinforced consistently? Is leadership actively involved?”
Safety performance directly impacts insurance outcomes, regulatory standing, and public perception in the freight industry. The answer to distracted driving begins behind the desk.
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