Why it is important to work safely

The reasons why it’s important to work safely can be categorized under three broad areas of moral reasons, legal reasons and financial reasons.

So first we’ll look at moral reasons. So what are morals? Well basically they are the codes of conduct within a society that govern or influence the way that people behave.

Now certainly in the UK it’s regarded as being morally unacceptable for people to be harmed or injured or made ill either through work that they do or through being injured or harmed by somebody else performing their work. So this could be a member of the public, a bystander or somebody from another company.

So if you carry out your work without taking reasonable care of yourself and others that’s regarded in the UK as being morally unacceptable. Now even if it’s only you that gets harmed, what I would encourage you to think about is the impact that that will have on others.

So for example if you were seriously injured at work think about the impact that it’s going to have not just on your life but on your family, your significant other, kids and think about the harm that even though you’re the person that got injured the damage that it would cause to other people that you care about.

There are also legal reasons why it’s important to work safely.

In the UK there is something called the Health and Safety at Work Act that makes it a legal requirement for employees to take reasonable care of themselves and others and also to comply with their employer over matters relating to health and safety.

If you don’t comply with a piece of legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act then you could be found guilty of a criminal offence and enforcement action could be taken against you which may include a fine or even in extreme circumstances imprisonment.

The area of law that we’re talking about when we talk about something like the Health and Safety at Work Act is criminal law. But there is another system of law in addition to criminal law which is called civil law.

What this is, it’s a type of law that allows an injured person or somebody that’s got a disease or somebody that’s suffered a legally recognized form of harm. It allows them to bring their own civil case against the person or legal entity that they deem to be responsible for their loss.

If they win their case in the civil courts they’ll be awarded what’s referred to as damages which is basically compensation that awards them a financial sum equivalent to the level of loss or the level of harm that they’ve suffered.

Finally there are financial reasons why it’s important to work safely.

Basically poor health and safety is very expensive because there are all sorts of costs that come out of a company’s budget relating to health and safety failures.

Lost time when somebody has to go home because they’re injured, the company still has to pay their wages. Extra wages for staff that need to fill in to substitute for the injured person.

Extra training that may be required either to make up for the absence of the injured person or following an incident if it’s identified that lack of training or competence was a factor.

A company usually needs to pay sick pay, production delays, fines, loss of contracts, legal costs arising from solicitors fees and barristers fees.

Damage caused to equipment, buildings, the time it takes to thoroughly investigate the incident and find out what went wrong.

Insurance premiums will increase and your business might suffer from a loss of reputation and customers will perceive you to be a socially irresponsible business and will therefore take their custom elsewhere.

So these reasons for why it’s important to work safely can be summarized and presented in a Venn diagram that depicts three overlapping spheres of influence.

So there’s the moral reasons that we discussed and one of the main ways that a society will exert its collective will is through the application of laws so that’s the first overlap between the moral reasons and the legal reasons.

And there’s also an overlap between legal reasons and financial reasons due to the fines that can be imposed upon a company for a breach of legislation in addition to compensation payouts and increased insurance premiums that were mentioned when we were discussing the financial reasons.