3 Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm for Holiday Safety

The holiday season is upon us. These strategies to avoid physical harm can keep your employees (and your loved ones too) safe while enjoying all this season has to offer.

Employers have to think about many things during the holidays. Workplace violence prevention is probably not high on that list. But, it should be. And that’s because the factors contributing to the four source types of workplace violence spike at this time of year.  

Stress (financial and personal), alcohol consumption, interpersonal difficulties, and mental health challenges, all increase during the holiday season. Add to that an increase in community violence, especially robbery, and domestic violence, and the risk of physical harm from violence grows with the holiday season. 

I spent 30 years investigating violence in the workplace and the community. You name it, I’ve seen it. And through my work I learned how violence happens and how it can be prevented. For the past 15 years, I’ve used that knowledge to help employers and employees, from a wide variety of fields, keep safe from violence.  

California now requires employers to implement an effective workplace violence prevention program. I put this workplace violence prevention training checklist together to help small and midsize employers take the guesswork out of keeping employees safer and complying with California’s workplace violence prevention training requirements. 

Nothing is More Important for Safety Than Situational Awareness

Safety, in the workplace and in the community, begins with situational awareness. It’s literally the most important thing you can do to keep safe from violence. Situational wareness allows you to recognize a potential safety threat early enough to avoid it. It’s the only safety strategy that does.

So implementing this strategy to avoid physical harm needs to be tops on the list for your employees, and for your loved ones too.  

Doing it effectively requires constant effort and systematic practice. But it’s something everyone can learn to do. 

It’s not just seeing or hearing a person that might physically harm you, but it’s also recognizing when the environment around you creates an additional opportunity for someone to harm you by obstructing your sight lines, and ability to exit a location where you are at a risk of being harmed. 

And then once you’ve become aware of a potential safety risk, to be able to process that information quickly, so that you can take action and avoid physical harm. 

De-Escalation

De-escalation is the process of a calming a tense situation before it can spiral into violence. Because violence can happen without warning, not every situation can be de-escalated. 

De-escalation requires you to engage in a a combination of actions, including showing an agitated person that you’re listening to them, and redirecting a person’s thoughts away from harming you. 

In order to de-escalate, you have to remain calm yourself. And to do that focus on your breathing, and speak calmly. We calm ourselves through talking. It’s part of our ability to self-soothe. Reflective listening, paraphrasing back to someone what they just said, is especially effective at helping to stay calm. Redirect a person’s thoughts away from harming you by getting him to have to listen to what you say.  

Few people can listen to someone speak and launch an attack at the same time.

You can also use your body language to project calm too. We do that by having our hands open and raised out in front of us with the palms facing the agitated person. Moving your hands gently forward and back visually signals “calm down” to a person. And from this position, you can protect yourself if necessary. Keep your shoulders relaxed, and knees slightly bent too. 

The Buddy System 

As the old adage goes, there’s safety in numbers. And the buddy system is an effective strategy to avoid harm from all four source types of workplace violence for just that reason.

It’s especially useful for the safety hazards that spike during the holiday season that are associated with family stressors, and the increase in robberies.  

It can be a great idea for any work related parties or events to incorporate the buddy system to ensure that employees make it safely to their cars at the end of their shift or a company party.

I help small and midsize employers implement to keep their employees safer. Take the guess work out of complying with California’s new workplace violence prevention requirements. Schedule a free consultation to discuss your workplace violence prevention program.