10 Questions CA Employers Must Answer About Workplace Violence Risks to Create a Violence Prevention Plan
California’s new workplace violence prevention law requires most employers to have an effective workplace violence prevention program in place by July 1st.
In this post, I’ll go over 10 questions that employers must answer in order to assess workplace violence risks. The information from these answers can help you to create an effective workplace violence prevention plan specific to your workplace violence hazards.
These questions are designed to help assess your employees’ risk to workplace violence based upon the four types of workplace violence sources identified by California in its new law. Click here to learn more about the 4 sources of workplace violence.
I help employers implement an effective workplace violence prevention program that keeps employees safer, and complies with the requirements of California’s new workplace violence prevention law.
My approach to preventing workplace violence is based upon what I learned during my 30+ years of working as a civil and criminal litigation investigator where I investigated many work related violence incidents, and to keep myself safe from violence while working in some very dangerous places.
California requires employers to have a workplace violence prevention program in place by July 1, 2024. I’ve got a great tool to help you get started developing your prevention program. My FREE workplace violence prevention checklist. It is a road map you can follow as you develop a workplace violence prevention plan. Just click here to download it now.
1. Where Do Your Employees Work?
Do your employees work at one location, or several? Do they work on site or out in the community? Or at client’s homes or businesses?
Assessing work locations is critical to helping you understand where the safety hazards your employees face are coming from, and how their work locations can put them at greater risk to violence. And can help you identify ways to lessen those risks.
Employees that work in the community, can face an increased safety risk due to greater interactions with the public. This is especially true in areas of higher community violence levels.
They also face an increased risk when working at a client’s location due to a lack of control over the environment, and the people within that environment.
Employees who work at one location only, may have a lower safety risk from the public, but can have an increased risk from targeted violence clients or their families, and from former intimate partners, due to working at a known location.
Understanding the link between work locations and the types and sources of safety threats, is a critical starting point for developing your workplace violence prevention program.
2. Who Do Your Employees Interact With During a Typical Workday?
Another starting point for creating an effective workplace violence prevention program is assessing who your employees interact with during a typical workday.
For example, legal service professionals deal not only with clients, but their families, friends, and witnesses too.
Medical professionals deal with patients and often their families. Professionals in both of these fields often deal with stressful situations that can increase reactivity and the likelihood of a violent incident.
Those who work in manufacturing, or in a warehouse setting, primarily interact with co-workers, supervisors, and manufacturers. Interpersonal dynamics can lead to violence when not properly addressed.
Restaurant and retail employees interact with the general public, which can lead to conflict, as can interactions with co-workers and managers.
3. Do Your Employees Meet One-on-One with Clients, Patients, or Others?
Service providers, and others, must often meet one-on-one with clients, patients, or others as part of their work.
Employees meeting in isolation with a client, or other individual, can face a greater safety threat.
Employers need to assess safety risks from the locations where these one-on-one meetings occur, so that safety training can be tailored to keep employees safe in those settings.
One-on-one meetings at your primary workplace can be made safer by ensuring that your employees cannot be physically trapped by the person they’re meeting with, and unable to exit the location safely if an incident occurs.
In case of meeting with clients or patients at their homes or workplaces, training can be provided to help your employees better assess safety risks at that location, and to proactively implement safety practices in response to their safety risk assessment.
4. Do Your Employees Handle Cash?
Workplace violence connected to criminal activity, like robberies, is the most obvious source of workplace violence. Especially in the retail, food service, and financial industries.
If your employees handle cash, safety training can be done for those working inside the establishment, as well as providing additional training for those who open, and close, the establishment, where the risk of robbery is at its greatest.
5. Do You Have a Formal Complaint Process for Employees?
How many times have you heard of a significant workplace violence incident where the media reports that complaints of bullying, harassment or threats by co-workers went unaddressed by the employer. I bet a lot.
The complaint process matters. California requires employers to develop an effective complaint process that employees feel comfortable using.
Without a formal complaint process, complaints can fall through the cracks, or be ignored. So you must assess your current complaint process and ensure that it is standardized with specific steps to follow.
Employees should receive written directives as to who complaints should be brought to, and what information should be submitted, when bringing forward a complaint of harassment, bullying, threats, or violence.
Your complaint process must also protect those bringing a complaint from retaliation for doing so.
6. Do You Have a Formal Investigation Process for Employee Complaints?
It not enough for employers to receive a complaint. They must act on the complaint too. The goal being to determining if the complaint has merit.
An effective investigation process is the best way to develop accurate information and to make a determination about the complaint. For the investigation process to be trusted, it must be standardized, so that each and every complaint is investigated in the same manner.
You should designate the person responsible for conducting the investigation, and how the investigation process should be carried out, and determinations made.
Click here to learn more about setting up an effective complaint and investigation process.
7. Where Do Your Employees Park?
Employee safety is not always the main concern when it comes to where employees park. But it should be.
The FBI has identified parking lots and parking garages as the third most common location for murders and assaults. Reducing the risk of workplace violence requires assessing employee parking, including looking at lighting, obstructions, and obstacles that can interrupt movement.
Does the parking lot make it easier for someone, such as a former intimate partner, to find and target your employee? It’s important to look at things that can obstruct employee visibility, including lighting, and obstructions, as well as access to walkways, and traffic flow.
Regardless of whether employees park in parking lots or on the street, employers must also assess how employees get from their parking place to their work location. What safety risks are there between those two places.
Click here for some parking lot and parking garage safety tips.
8. Do You Have a Communication Process That Helps Employees Notify Others of a Safety Risk?
There’s safety in numbers. Assessing communication methods that employees facing a safety risk can use to alert others should be part of your prevention planning.
Front desk staff, and retail staff should be able to report safety concerns during an encounter without tipping off the person creating the safety risk.
Using wireless buzzers to flash once for help, and twice to call 911, and implementing the use of a specific password that signifies a concern about safety are ways to improve communication options.
Employees working in the community in higher risk areas should be able to call, or radio, directly to one or two specific people without having to go through voicemail.
9. Are Your Employees Trained in Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm From Workplace Violence?
California requires that employees know how to avoid physical harm from a potentially violent incident. So it’s important to assess what types of training you’re providing to your employees to help them avoid physical harm.
There are three main strategies for avoiding physical harm:
Avoiding safety threats through implementing situational awareness. Click here to learn more about this strategy.
De-escalating a tense situation before it spirals into violence. Click here to learn more about this strategy.
Self-defense when avoidance and de-escalation are not possible. These strategies can be implemented for employees that work on site, and for employees that work in the community. Click here to learn more about this strategy.
10. Is Your Physical Environment Increasing or Decreasing Safety Risks?
The physical work environment can increase or decrease employee vulnerability to workplace violence safety hazards.
Things to assess include, lighting, ease of public access to employees and the workplace, interior space layout, outdoor obstructions, and personal work area spaces.
Also look at entry and exit points, foot and vehicle traffic areas, and visibility that provides the ability to notice potential safety threats before they turn into safety threats, as part of your prevention program.
Identifying physical environment safety risks so that they can be corrected, and training employees to better understand the role their physical environment plays in their safety, as part of your workplace violence prevention program, will help keep your staff safer, and comply with California’s new workplace violence prevention requirements.
Want to get started on developing the required workplace violence prevention program by the July 1, 2024 deadline? Download my FREE workplace violence prevention checklist. It’s a great road map for you to follow as you develop a workplace violence prevention plan. Just click here to download it now.
If you’d like some help establishing, creating, and implementing the workplace violence prevention program required by the new California law, click here and schedule a free telephone consultation.
