Avoiding Physical Harm From Workplace Violence

In its new workplace violence prevention law, California requires employers to train employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence.

In doing so, what California is really saying, no one can anticipate every potential workplace violence safety hazard, so ensuring your employees develop the skills to keep themselves safe must be part of your approach to workplace violence prevention. 

Think of strategies to avoid harms as an essential plan B.

So what are strategies to avoid harm?

In this piece, I'm going to share what I've taught to employees of all types of organizations from the staff of a United States Senator, to  judges, court administrators and staff, as well as to volunteer church safety teams, and educators.

I developed these skill sets during my 30 years of working by myself in some incredibly unsafe environments. They work.

Strategies to avoid physical harm is just one of many requirements needed to implement a workplace violence prevention program that complies with California's new law. Looking to get started developing your workplace violence prevention plan. Download my free California workplace violence prevention checklist.

Avoidance

The very best place to start in training your employees to avoid physical harm is to help them recognize a potential threat to safety BEFORE it turns into a threat to their safety.

When you can automatically recognize threats beforehand, you have the time to develop a strategy to avoid that threat, and to implement that strategy.

So what we're talking about is a strategy with three components:

• Seeing and hearing potential threats in advance, with enough time to give you a chance to avoid that threat.
• Developing the ability to understand where threats to safety can come from so that when you see or hear that you develop a plan to avoid them. 
• Creating an exit strategy.

You can learn more about how to do that here.

 The Buddy System

There will be times where the very best approach your employees can take when dealing with the risk of physical harm from workplace violence is to get help from a co-worker, supervisor, or even a stranger.

The buddy system recognizes that there is safety in numbers and utilizes that to take a potential attacker out of his game plan. And even if he forms that strategy in just a few seconds before, most attackers develop a strategy before attacking.

The buddy system incorporates these elements:

• Identifying the person to request help from. Maybe it's a co-worker or supervisor. Maybe it's a patron at your establishment. Maybe it's a family member of your client.
• Communicating the need for help. This can be done both verbally and using devices like wireless buzzers.
•  Communicating the type of assistance needed.

You can learn more about implementing the buddy system here.

Calming a Tense Situation

The ability to calm a tense situation before it spirals into workplace violence is critical to your employees' ability to avoid physical harm. Think of it as their last chance to prevent physically engaging. Anytime you have to engage physically with an attacker you risk physical harm.

Calming a tense situation requires developing certain skills, including:

• Reading an angry or agitated person's body language so you can determine if de-escalation has a chance or if you must brace for a physical attack.
• Shifting an attacker's focus away from his own thoughts.
• Using your own body language to depict calm, while still being able to defend yourself if that becomes necessary.
• Keeping yourself calm through breathing techniques and other practices.

Here's some more information on applying this strategy to avoid physical harm.

Defending Yourself and Others

Most employers never consider providing basic self-defense skills to their employees. No one wants to think about situations where employees may need to defend themselves or others physically. 

But, applying these skills may be the last chance your employees have to avoid physical harm.

Self-defense is not what most people think it is. Here's what is important to understand about your employees knowing what to do if other steps to avoid physical harm fail:

• Self-defense is about creating the opportunity to exit safely once physical engagement has begun.
• Self-defense is about forcing an attacker to recalibrate his strategy by lessening the effectiveness of his initial attack.
• Self-defense is about simplicity of movement and physically patterning actions so they become automatic when operating in a stressful situation..
• Self-defense is about understanding that anything and everything can be a weapon, whether offensive or defensive.

To learn more about what self-defense is and is not.

There's reasons why California requires employers to train their employees in strategies to avoid physical harm. And that it's not enough to know of them. Employees must learn how to do them effectively under real world conditions.

Looking to get started developing your workplace violence prevention plan. Download my free California workplace violence prevention checklist.