California's New Workplace Violence Prevention Law Training Requirements

California’s new workplace violence prevention law requires employers to provide a variety of trainings to their employees.

So what types of training must you provide to your employees?

Some of the required trainings are fairly basic, and could apply in a general way, to most any employee in most any workplace.

But, other required trainings must be specific to the workplace violence hazards your employees face, and those safety hazards based upon the types of work they do.

In this piece we’ll look at the training requirements in California’s new workplace violence prevention law, and how to determine which trainings to provide to your employees.

The Basics

The most basic trainings required under the new law are mostly administrative “housekeeping” in nature. The type of trainings you’d find in most places of employment regardless of the type of work done. They include:

•  Training your employees on your workplace violence prevention plan including what it entails, and how to get a copy of it. 
•  Training on how to report incidents of workplace violence to the employer including training on how to use a written complaint form and who to submit it to.
•  Training on the violent incident log, its elements and purpose.
•  Training on workplace violence, its definitions, and the different types of sources of workplace violence.

These trainings and the material they cover are fairly straightforward. 

These administrative type trainings can easily be combined into one training session for your current employees. And for new hires, these trainings can be combined with your typical new hire trainings. 

Trainings Specific to Your Employees’ Unique Safety Hazards

So now let’s dive into the types of training required under the new law that must be specific to the safety hazards that your employees face, based upon the nature of their work. 

Where your employees do different types of work, such as front off, outside sales, providing services directly to clients, customers, or patients, you may need to provide different types of trainings to the different types of employees you have since their safety hazards differ.

And this is where California’s requirement for employee involvement in designing and implementing training is absolutely right, and necessary, in order for the trainings you provide to be effective.

Employee input will help you ensure that you are providing the required trainings to your employees that are specific to their workplace violence safety hazards, and to do so effectively. California requires employers to provide:

•  Training on the workplace violence hazards that are specific to your employees’ jobs.
•  Training on the corrective measures employers have implemented based upon the safety hazard assessment conducted.
•  Training on how to seek assistance to prevent or respond to violence that are specific to your organization.
•  Training your employees on strategies to avoid physical harm from violence that are specific to the safety hazards they face.
•  And finally, training those of your employees who will be involved in your incident response processes, whether that's during an actual incident, or the post incident complaint, investigation, and remediation processes.

Effective workplace violence prevention has many facets to it. My California workplace violence prevention checklist can help you prepare your prevention program. 

Want to discuss implementing your workplace violence prevention plan including providing effective training specific to your employees unique safety hazards. Send me an email at [email protected] and we’ll set up some time to discuss your workplace violence prevention needs.