James Bond and California's Workplace Violence Prevention Law

James Bond experienced a lot of workplace violence. He kept himself safe (relatively speaking, since it’s Bond after all), by employing strategies to avoid physical harm from the work related violence he faced. 

OK, Bond is a fictional character who worked for a secret intelligence service. And your employees don’t face the safety hazards that Bond faced as depicted by Ian Fleming, the author who created Bond. 

While Bond was fictional, Ian Fleming, had extensive real life experience with violence. During world war two, Fleming created and led, an intelligence service commando unit. And he worked closely with the man who developed the training manual used by allied intelligence forces to prepare the women and men sent to work behind enemy lines. 

So how’s this bit of history relevant to your organization and your employees’ ability to avoid physical harm from workplace violence? 

California requires employers to annually train employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence. And when it comes to keeping employees safe from workplace violence, there’s much that can be learned from the training provided to those women and men. After all, avoiding physical harm from violence was a critical to the success of their work.  

In this piece, I’ll discuss some of what the allied forces taught their trainees, and how their approach to keeping safe can help your employees avoid physical harm from workplace violence.

It can be difficult to know what does and doesn’t work when it comes to workplace violence prevention training. Getting it wrong can lead to serious consequences for your employees and your organization.

Take the guess work out of the types of training you provide to your employees. Download my CA Employers Workplace Violence Prevention Training Checklist. It covers California’s training requirements, and which types of training are effective at keeping your employees safe from violence, and the physical harm it can cause. 

Safety Fundamentals Repurposed for Workplace Violence Prevention

The allied forces stressed certain safety principles to their trainees to keep them safe while they worked behind enemy lines.  The stakes were incredibly high for them with no room for error. Everything they learned had to work. Here’s some of what the trainees were taught to help them avoid physical harm from violence:

•  Self-protection starts with good information. Information is a tool that helps people make decisions. The better the quality of the information the better your decisions will be. When it comes to safety, you collect information from a variety of sources, including using your senses, which alert you to potential violence problems. Helping your employees avoid physical harm from violence starts with training them in the ability to develop and assess information from a variety of sources. Sometimes that’s reading the environment around you to recognize a safety, such as in the parking lot, or in a client’s home or office, so that you can avoid it completely. Other times it is about being able to read body language, and using that information to recognize that a physical attack is likely to occur. These skills are not automatic and must be learned.
•  Safety precautions must become automatic habits. The allied forces trainees were taught that safety comes from repetition. They were trained to practice an action so often that it became automatic. The goal in doing so is to be able to take action without thinking. Once a safety action becomes habit, it can be applied in any number of situations. When training your employees in workplace violence prevention safety, your focus should be on ensuring that they learn to implement their safety actions, through repetition, until those safety habits become automatic. Having too many options at their disposal is actually the wrong approach as it leads to thinking instead of acting. The delay caused from paralysis by analysis, can lead to employees being physically harmed. 
•  Be observant. The need to be observant at all times, was constantly drilled into the women and men as being critical to their safety while working behind enemy lines. The earlier you recognize a potential safety threat the better you can avoid it completely, or be able to counter it before it can harm you. Observation skills require training. Yes, some people have an innate ability to read the environment around them and the actions of people within that environment. But most people don’t. So it’s very important for employers to not just assume that your employees are observant, you need to teach them to be so. Being able to observe, and assess potential workplace violence safety hazards before they can lead to physical harm, is the best skill your employees can develop. Avoidance is far safer than engaging. 
•  Have foresight. Foresight is the ability to predict something based upon the different types of clues you receive. The men and women sent to work behind enemy lines were trained in the ability to anticipate safety hazards. By being able to anticipate safety hazards, they were well positioned to avoid being physically harmed. The old adage of to be forewarned is to be forearmed is exactly what it developing foresight means. Anticipating safety hazards that might occur, allows you to develop an exit strategy, before you actually need to utilize it. It’s critical that you train your employees in recognizing potential safety threats before they become an actual threat, and then developing, in advance, ways to escape from that safety threat. 
•  Plan for contingencies. What do you do when your plan to avoid physical harm won’t work? Circumstances can change quickly, and what the unexpected can happen, including with violence. The allied forces focused their training on the ability to create alternative courses of action. Contingency planning is not an innate skill so it requires learning how to do so. It re alternate scenarios, quickly, and then keeping your options open. I call this an if then strategy. If A happens then you do one thing, if B happens you do another thing. The key here is to not be caught flatfooted so to speak, with no good options available to you. When training your employees it’s important for them to under the nature of violence. That it  is not linear, and can occur at any point during any interaction, and without warning. And that the best laid plans don’t often happen. Creating contingency plans requires recognizing how quickly things can change, and then recognizing that change, so you can take the right approach to be safe, during any situation.

California leaves determining the most effective types of training in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence up to employers. You can take the guesswork out of the best ways to train your employees by looking at what is proven to work.

Having to make a judgment call about what your employees need to know in order to protect their physical safety is not something most employers are experienced as It requires an understanding of violence, how it happens, and what steps are effective in preventing it. 

Schedule a free 15 minute consultation to discuss the most effective strategies to help your employees avoid physical harm from the specific workplace violence safety hazards they face.