You’re Not Imagining It. Creating a California Required Workplace Violence Prevention Plan is Harder than for Other Workplace Issues

If you’ve plowed right through creating a workplace violence prevention plan that meets the different requirements of California’s new workplace violence prevention plan, congrats and more power to you! Time to implement the plan. And to make sure the trainings you conduct specifically address your employees’ actual workplace violence safety hazards.

But if putting together a workplace violence plan that meets California’s requirements has been a challenge for you. You should know that you’re not alone. And that there’s several reason why it’s harder to put together the required workplace violence prevention plan than it is for other employment related matters.

Here are some of those reasons:

•  California requires the active involvement of your employees throughout the planning, implementing and training process. That includes in assessing the specific workplace violence safety hazards they face, determining approaches to remedy those safety hazards, and in determining the types of training that will reduce their risk of physical harm from workplace violence. Addressing other types of employment matters like sex harassment, discrimination, time card fraud, is simpler. Top down, policies without employee input in the process.
•  California requires your workplace violence prevention plan, its implementation, and the training you conduct for your employees to be SPECIFIC to their safety risks. That means determining their specific safety needs, and tailoring the establishment, implementation, and maintenance of your plan to meeting your employees specific safety needs. It’s fully custom. Not boilerplate. Other workplace issues are broad based, and most like sex harassment, gender, race, religious, ancestry, and age discrimination are based on Federal law. So generic works for those types of issues since it applies everywhere.
•  Although there are almost 2,000,000 workplace violence incidents reported annually, and that’s likely an undercount since many incidents go unreported, many people have not experienced workplace violence. Creating a plan based upon their specific safety hazards that they’ve not actually experienced feels like operating in a vacuum. You’re still required to identify safety hazards, and ways to remediate them, how you’ll train your employees to recognize those unique safety hazards, and how to avoid physical harm from them, when your employees haven’t experienced any incidents themselves. That’s seriously difficult.
•  California requires employers to assess their employees’ safety risks based upon four different source types of workplace violence. And how you address that depends upon how much interaction your employees have with three of those source types during their work, while the fourth source type (domestic violence) deals with your employees’ private lives. That’s a difficult line for any employer or employee to navigate.

If you’re struggling to create and implement your workplace violence prevention plan required under California’s new workplace violence prevention law I can help. 

I’ve created the CA Employers Workplace Violence Prevention Tool Kit. Your step-by-step, and one-stop shop, guide to establishing your California required workplace violence prevention plan. You get a PDF guidebook, a PDF workbook, and a companion video series, delivered directly to your email. So no matter what your learning style is, you’re covered. Peace of mind is a nice feeling.

If you’d like help in the establishment, implementation, training, and maintaining of your required workplace violence prevention plan, send me an email to [email protected] and we’ll set up some time to chat about your specific needs.