Keeping Employees Who Work In The Community Safe From Violence

The term workplace violence doesn’t really cut it. Work related violence is a more accurate term for the real world violence safety hazards employees face.

Many employees work at least part of the time in the field rather than full time at a traditional workplace. Not to be confused with agricultural work, working in the field means doing your work in the community.

Whether it’s working with clients at their place of business or residence, or providing services directly within the community, for the many employees who don’t work full time in a conventional workplace, the safety hazards they face can be quite different from those who work in a more controlled work environment. 

In this piece we’ll look at strategies to help employees who work in the community avoid physical harm from work related violence. It requires different approaches than for those working in a more conventional workplace. 

Safety Hazards for Employees Working in The Community 

I spent 30+ years working in the field. And did so in some very dangerous places in California and New Mexico. 

My work involved approaching a total stranger’s home unannounced, knocking on the door, and having just a few seconds to convince them to let me into their home, so that I could interview them about something really tragic they had witnessed. And sometimes, after interviewing them, I had to hand them a witness subpoena. Being compelled to go to court or to a deposition is not something most people enjoy. 

In most cases, I knew very little about the person including if they had a propensity towards anger or violence. I did not know if there were firearms or other weapons in the house. I also didn’t know who else might be inside the house at the time. And when I began doing that type of work in the late 1980s, I didn’t even have a cell phone in case something happened. 

In order to be effective at my work, I had to assess the unique safety risks of working in a variety of different settings, and use that information to develop strategies to avoid physical harm. 

Relative to working at a traditional workplace setting, working in the community presents some unique safety hazards:

•  You have no control over the environment that you are in.
•  You have no say over who is present while you are there.
•  You don’t know the location you are working as well as those who work in a conventional workplace do.
•  You are more susceptible to community crime and violence.
•  It’s easier for someone more familiar with their own environment to trap you and keep you from leaving. 

Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm While Working in The Community 

California requires employers to train employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence. So here are the strategies to avoid physical harm that I used to keep safe while  working in the community. 

Situational Awareness 

The single most important safety strategy to implement when working in the community is to be able to read the environment around you and the people within it. This allows you to recognize potential safety threats early enough to be able to avoid them entirely.  

Think of it as early warning = options = safety. 

This is especially critical for employees working in areas with high levels of community violence, when working in a new, and unfamiliar location, when working with unfamiliar people in their environment, when parking in a parking lot or on the street, and when traveling for work.  

Developing situational awareness skills helps you to better anticipate and respond faster to a safety threat. Helping you to be able to avoid engaging with that safety threat at all. 

Recognizing a safety threat earlier also helps take away an attacker’s ability to launch a surprise attack. 

Situational awareness skills helps employees to quickly develop an exit strategy so they can get to a safer location before a potential threats becomes a physical attack. 

De-escalation 

America has an anger problem. You can see it in the way people drive. You can see it in how quickly arguments turn into shouting matches and into physical attacks. And on top of that, many communities are dealing with a mental health and substance abuse crises. Both of which contribute further to our anger problem. 

We can’t fix the anger problem individually. But we can develop de-escalation skills as the next level of your employees strategies to avoid physical harm in case situational awareness isn’t able to help you avoid interacting with a person who may present a safety threat. 

De-escalation is not verbal judo. It’s not verbally sparing with someone or trying to use leverage on them.  

De-escalation is about helping someone mentally switch gears. To get them mentally out of the angry place they’re at before that anger can be acted on physically. 

You do that through developing a combination of skills. Reflective listening, asking questions, using your own body language to convey calm, and reading the other person’s body language to ascertain if de-escalation has the chance to work. 

For some, these skills come more easily than they will for others. But being able to apply them gives you the last opportunity to avoid physical engagement.  

You should still be prepared for the possibility that de-escalation won’t work, which can happen when a person is too deep into their anger to come out of it. 

No strategy to avoid physical harm is 100% fool proof. So even when trying to de-escalate your employees should still be prepared for the possibility of being physically attacked. 

Changing the Dynamics of An Attack 

If de-escalation fails, your employee is at serious risk of being physically harmed. That’s what California is trying to avoid by having employees be trained in avoiding physical harm from violence. So it’s critical for your employees who work in the community, to be trained in some additional strategies to avoid physical harm.  

Think of it this way. If strategy A doesn’t work, go to strategy B, if that doesn’t work go to strategy C and so on. 

Training employees in changing the dynamics of an attack allows your employees to survive the onslaught of an initial attack to give them a better chance of avoiding physical harm. 

Changing the dynamics of an attack entails forcing an attacker to have to recalibrate his plan of attack by forcing him out of his game plan. While de-escalation mostly verbal and listening skills, changing the dynamics of an attack typically requires physical action.  

It can be as basic as creating a barrier between yourself and an attacker like getting on the other side of a car or using interior furniture to create a barrier . It can be using footwork or a blocking technique to avoid being harmed by the initial attack.  

Even if it’s a split second before hand, attackers typically formulate a plan of attack. And that usually involves the element of surprise or a sneak attack. No attacker is going to say to your employees I’m going to attack you now. Instead, an attacker perceives an opening and goes for it.

Stoping that initial attack so that it does not harm you, creates the opportunity for your employees to exit safely, or at least to defend themselves.

Statistically, avoiding being harmed in the initial attack gives your employees a much better chance to get out of there safely. The vast majority of attacks are over and done within 7 seconds. 

Forcing an attacker to recalibrate his attack will take most attackers close to that amount of time just to recalibrate. And in that time, there’s opportunity to avoid physical harm.

And just so we are clear. Running away when you are able to do so is both changing the dynamics of an attack and self-defense, and qualifies as a strategy to avoid physical harm.

Self-Defense 

California in its new law, goes into great detail to define the different actions that make up workplace violence. Here’s something interesting. California expressly states in the law that self-defense and defense of others when faced with a threat is not workplace violence. These are considered safety actions and are exempted.

And for good reason. There are times when the only way to avoid physical harm is to physically defend yourself or a co-worker. 

The goal of course is to try to avoid having to do so at all costs. But employers have to be aware that there are times when the only way to avoid physical harm from violence is to physically defend yourself.

Self-defense is not fighting. It’s not fancy martial arts or MMA sport. It’s about keeping yourself safe from harm so that you exit as quickly and as safely as possible.

In fact, a key component of understanding and applying self-defense when absolutely necessary is to understand what it is and what it isn’t.

In the end, for self-defense to be effective, it has to be something that anyone can use regardless of size or strength. It must be simple and it must become automatic. In the end it’s about patterning a few basic actions so they become automatic.

There's a lot of pieces to an effective workplace violence prevention plan. I've got a checklist you can use to get started. If you're struggling with creating your plan as required under California's new workplace violence prevention law and you need more help, check out my CA Employers Workplace Violence Prevention Tool Kit. It’s a guidebook, workbook, and video series that takes you step-by-step through creating an effective workplace violence prevention plan as required under California’s new workplace violence prevention plan.

If you’d like to learn more about implementing your plan and training your employees who work in the community, in recognizing, and avoiding workplace violence safety hazards, as well as in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence, send me an email at [email protected] and we can set up some time to chat about your workplace violence prevention needs.