Is Conventional Wisdom Wrong About Workplace Violence?

What if conventional wisdom about workplace violence, and its prevention, is all wrong?

For employers in California, complying with the state’s new workplace violence prevention law requires implementing an effective workplace violence prevention program that’s specific to your employees safety risks. 

But to do that, employers must start thinking outside the box of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom surrounding workplace violence, and its prevention, developed in response to a couple of horrific events whose magnitude shocked our nation’s consciousness. 

Yet, despite their prominence in how we think about workplace violence, the circumstance of those violent incidents are not reflective of the vast majority of workplace violence incidents. As a result, employers whose approach to workplace violence prevention followed the conventional wisdom are out of step with their employees actual safety risks.

In this piece, I’ll discuss what conventional wisdom has gotten wrong about workplace violence, and why keeping employees safer, and complying with California’s requirements means that employers must reimagine their approach to workplace violence prevention.

I put together my free California workplace violence prevention checklist to help you do just that. It focuses on what makes for an effective approach to employee safety, and compliance with California’s new law.

The Two Incidents that Shaped Conventional Wisdom Surrounding Workplace Violence

I started conducting investigations into violent incidents, including those in the workplace, just two years after a US Postal Service employee in Oklahoma gunned down 14 co-workers, starting with his supervisor, and wounded 6 more before taking his own life.

The magnitude of that workplace violence incident shook our nation to its core. Just as another incident would over a decade later.

At the time, the Oklahoma postal service employee shooting was the third largest mass casualty incident committed by an individual, in US history. Over the next decade several other workplace violence shootings by postal employees followed, likely inspired by the Oklahoma shooting. 

Few incidents have shaped our perceptions about workplace violence as much as the Oklahoma shooting did. Not only did that particular shooting help coin the phrase “going postal”, but it shaped the belief that workplace violence is caused by “disgruntled” employees.

And as a result, that led to employers looking at workplace violence prevention through the prism of “profiling” in hopes of identifying, and removing from the workplace, employees capable of going “postal”. 

The shooter in Oklahoma certainly was “disgruntled”. A loner, who was reprimanded multiple times for poor job performance. He didn’t interact with co-workers, except to threaten them whenever he got disciplined. And he was obsessed with guns.

Conventional wisdom, driven by federal law enforcement recommendations, led to employers trying to suss out through profiling employees who exhibited behaviors similar to the Oklahoma shooter. Over time, employers added a few more behaviors to their profiling list, including experiencing a break up, drinking excessively, and financial troubles. 

Employers were counseled to use profiling to proactively identify employees capable of snapping at any time. 

And this approach to workplace violence prevention became our conventional wisdom as the media, including television drama shows, were rife with images of corporate security escorting employees from the workplace who had been terminated for exhibiting the identified behaviors. 

Over a decade later, a second watershed workplace violence incident occurred at Columbine High School in Colorado. 

Columbine, a mass casualty incident combined with a parent’s worst nightmare, also reverberated throughout our nation’s psyche. 

And as a result, like the shooting in Oklahoma, Columbine had an outsized influence on workplace violence conventional wisdom. Leading to the creation of “active shooter” trainings, complete with flashing lights, smoke, and the sounds of gunfire, to add “realism”. 

The conventional wisdom went, that if profiling failed to detect a disgruntled employee capable of mass violence, training employees on how to respond, would save lives when that disgruntled employee went off.

Columbine was followed several years later by the shooting at Virginia Tech, and then at Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde.  

Live shooter trainings became so pervasive that even pre-schools were providing that type of training to their staff and little ones. 

What Workplace Violence Conventional Wisdom Get’s Wrong

But, has the conventual wisdom the developed from these incidents actually reduced workplace violence?

No. In fact, reported workplace violence incidents have skyrocketed, rising from 1.3 million to about 2 million per year. An 85% increase.

Part of that increase may be due to better reporting. But, mostly, it’s because conventional wisdom focused on addressing a fairly rare type of workplace violence.  

For starters, there are four distinct source types for workplace violence: community driven crime (Type 1), invitee violence (Type 2), co-worker (Type 3), and employee family connected violence (Type 4). And each of the four source types is responsible for roughly 25% of workplace violence incidents. 

So just in terms of percentages, conventional wisdom ignores 75% of the most common sources of workplace violence. Profiling is ineffective against community related, invitee, and employee’s intimate partner violence. 

The focus upon profiling and active shooter training is to prevent or reduce the fallout from the worst kind of workplace violence, mass casualty.  

But those types of workplace violence incidents are quite rare. From 1966 through 2021, there were 53 mass workplace shootings. While one is too many, the reality is that as a percentage of workplace violence incidents, it is extremely small. 

Each year, nearly 1 million people are physically assaulted at work, and about 100,000 employees are treated at the ER for non-fatal injuries from workplace violence. 

Thus, conventional wisdom drove employers to focus on workplace violence that isn’t common enough to justify that focus. 

To be effective at workplace violence prevention, employers need to focus their efforts on the types of workplace violence most likely to impact your employees. And to prepare your employees to avoid physical harm from those specific safety hazards. 

And that is exactly what California requires. 

What Conventional Wisdom Gets Wrong about “Disgruntled” Employees 

Here’s an unvarnished truth. Preventing co-worker violence is easier for an employer to do than  it is to prevent violence from any other source type. All it takes is being proactive. And there’s two reasons for that. Employers have control over their employees, and nothing happens in a vacuum.  

Interceding effectively before someone becomes “disgruntled” is something employers can do easily with a standardized complaint process. One where employees know how and to whom to report their concerns.

And, implementing an effective investigation process that quickly looks into allegations of abusive behavior by any employee, including management and supervisory level personnel, will help to prevent co-worker problems from spiraling into violence. 

I conducted many investigations into abusive behaviors in the workplace for private sector, nonprofit, and government organizations. The investigations I conducted provided the factual information the employers needed in order to make sound employment decisions.  

And not once following one of the investigations that I conducted, did the reported behavior escalate further into violence. 

We also no longer hear of postal employee shootings any more. That’s because the post office changed how it addressed some of the issues within the workplace that led to the abusive behavior. Essentially nipping the potential for violence in the bud. 

Contrast that with the 2022 shooting at the Walmart in Newport News, Virginia, where time and again, employees reported abusive behavior by the night supervisor, but nothing was done to address the reported behaviors because his superiors felt that he got his job done. So why rock the boat. 6 people died because of that failure to address those complaints. 

Workplace Violence Prevention Reimagined

California’s new workplace violence prevention law actually helps redirect the focus on workplace violence prevention to where it needs to be in order to be effective, as it requires employees to conduct an assessment to determine the specific safety hazards your employees face. 

And then to use the information developed through the assessment to determine ways to remediate those safety hazards. In addition, the law requires employers to train employees every year in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence. 

Getting that right requires covering the safety threats your employees face from all four source types of workplace violence. And for your employees’ safety, it’s critical that they understand the non-linear nature of violence. 

Violence does not follow a specific progression. Sometimes there’s time to de-escalate, but many times violence happens without warning. And your employees need to be prepared to keep safe either way. 

And it’s very important to understand that in terms of employee safety, that you can’t rely on law enforcement to keep them safe. Law enforcement responds after the fact to violence, not before hand. And as such, getting your employees to recognize and avoid safety threats when possible, and to know how to respond when that’s not possible should be central to your focus.

I’ve got a free checklist on California workplace violence prevention training that will help you identify the trainings that will help your employees avoid physical harm from violence. Download it to make sure you're providing all of the required trainings to keep your employees safer and comply with California's requirements.