What is duty of care?
Duty of care is the standard by which someone is held liable for a plaintiff’s injury in personal injury cases like medical malpractice, car accidents, slips, and falls. If a person or organization breaches a duty of care, they may be liable to a third party for negligence.
What is duty of care in a company?
A company practices duty of care when they do every it can to ensure its workers' health and safety by shielding them from any risk of harm or danger. This includes identifying and mitigating hazards and establishing measures to safeguard employees, regardless of where they work. This can also mean providing tools, materials, and equipment so that these workers can complete their jobs.
How has the concept of duty of care evolved?
Duty of care started as a common law principle in the 19th century and further evolved after the Second Industrial Revolution to protect factory workers from harsh and dangerous labor conditions.
Today, duty of care has become much more than an ambiguous legal term. In the past ten years, lawmakers have put an increasing focus on the predictability of events and recognizing that employers have a responsibility to assess risks and dangers and take appropriate actions to mitigate them. This forms the modern definition of duty of care to broadly encompass a company’s legal, ethical, and fiduciary duty to protect employees from risks and dangers when working or traveling on behalf of the organization.
What happens when a company is in breach?
In Canada and the United States, there are stringent health and safety and employment laws to ensure companies take reasonable steps to protect their workers. Failure to adhere to these can result in heavy fines for the organization or supervisors. For extreme breaches that result in injuries or death, the penalty includes imprisonment.
Aside from the legal obligations, a company has a moral responsibility to protect their workers. Unsafe working conditions lead to low morale and high stress which result in a decrease of productivity, increase in absences and turnover rates. In the United States, stress and depression are estimated to cause 200 million lost workdays each year at a cost of $17 billion to $44 billion to employers.
How to improve duty of care with worker technology?
- Advancements in IoT and worker safety: With the rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), connectivity has reached unprecedented levels. In the realm of Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS), one of the key innovations is connected worker technology. This technology forms a robust network of hardware and software that seamlessly links each worker with a system of connective technologies. These technologies facilitate real-time data exchange with other devices and machines, integrating a worker's actions into a broader operational system.
- Enhancing productivity and safety: Connected worker technologies are pivotal in driving superior productivity, enhancing decision-making accuracy, and ensuring tasks are completed correctly the first time around. More importantly, they substantially improve worker safety by contextualizing individual actions within the larger system, helping to anticipate and mitigate potential risks.
- Preventive and emergency support: These technologies are crucial not only in emergencies—providing at-risk workers with immediate access to help—but also in preventing incidents before they occur. By leveraging Aware360’s suite of solutions, which include cutting-edge edge devices, workers are connected continuously to a global network of response teams. This ensures around-the-clock protection for workers, wherever they are, ensuring that duty of care is not just met but exceeded.How can Aware360 enhance duty of care with connected worker technology?
How can Aware360 enhance duty of care with connected worker technology?
Aware360 revolutionizes workplace safety through its cutting-edge connected worker technology. By integrating real-time monitoring and communication systems, Aware360 ensures that every worker, regardless of location, is within immediate reach of help.
This comprehensive connectivity not only empowers workers to perform their duties confidently but also equips employers with the tools to exceed their duty of care obligations, fostering a safer and more responsive work environment.
Talk to us today and see how we can help keep your workers safe and productive.
