Rethinking Workplace Violence Prevention

“My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.” Dashiell Hammett, wrote of Sam Spade, the private detective protagonist in his novel the Maltese Falcon.

For many employers, California’s new workplace violence prevention law serves a bit like that monkey-wrench. In order to comply with the requirements of the law, many employers have had to venture into uncharted waters in order to learn about workplace violence and its prevention. 

And that’s because the new law requires employers to rethink workplace violence prevention. It requires employers to go much more in depth when developing and implementing a prevention program and to conduct a variety of trainings for their employees that they have not had to previously conduct. 

I’ve always enjoyed reading Hammett because his path to writing detective novels was different from most others. He worked as a private detective for years before turning to writing. His real life experience as a detective brought insights to his work that other writers lacked.

Similarly, my approach to workplace violence prevention is shaped by what I learned during 30 years of conducting investigations into real world workplace and community violence. 

In today’s piece, we’ll look at why complying with California’s new workplace violence prevention law requires employers to rethink their approach to workplace violence prevention.

Take the guesswork out of complying with California’s new workplace violence prevention law with my CA Employers Workplace Violence Prevention Checklist. It outlines, step-by-step, the workplace violence prevention program employers must now implement  

Workplace Violence Has Changed. Prevention Approaches Must Change Too

Traditionally, employers thought of workplace violence as being committed by “disgruntled” current and former employees. What California categorizes as workplace violence source type 3. As a result, employers focused their workplace violence prevention efforts on identifying potentially “disgruntled”employees. 

Because workplace violence was viewed as being caused by employees, employers followed the same approach they do about other types of workplace issues like sexual harassment and discrimination. 

Creating “thou shall not” policies prohibiting threatening behavior. Supervisors and HR were instructed to monitor the actions of any employee who engaged in prohibited behavior, and if necessary, to remove that employee from the workplace.

But treating workplace violence like other employment issues doesn’t meet California’s requirements. And that’s because it misses the majority of the real world workplace violence safety hazards your employees face.

75% of all workplace violence is committed by someone other than an employee. Collectively, your employees face a greater risk of being targeted for violence by members of the community (source type 1), clients, patients, customers and other invitees (source type 2), and their family members and friends (source type 4), than they do from their co-workers.

California’s new law threw a monkey-wrench into the traditional way of thinking about workplace violence by focusing on this fact and requiring employers to prevent workplace violence from all four source types, and not just from co-workers.

Internal investigations, write ups, transferring or firing employees, and other employment actions designed to prevent co-worker violence are irrelevant to preventing violence by non-employees. 

Thus, complying with the new law, requires employers to rethink their approach to workplace violence prevention in order to address the safety hazards that their employees face from the majority of workplace violence sources.

Adjusting Violence Prevention Approaches to Account for Societal Changes

Workplace violence is now driven primarily by issues outside of the workplace, like grievance based anger, stress, crime, family strife, and insufficient mental health resources.

As a result, employers need to adjust their workplace violence prevention approaches to focus more on providing employees with the skills and strategies necessary to be safe from violence driven by those societal changes. California now requires employers to train employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from those types of violence sources.

This is a recognition that employees face an entirely different type of safety threat, and that employers are responsible for ensuring employees can keep safe from violence regardless of who it comes from. 

This is a much more proactive approach than previously required. In fact, California calls for an entirely different approach to preventing this type of workplace violence versus preventing co-worker violence, which relies upon an effective complaint and investigation process to be able to address any complaints as they arise. And then nipping the actions leading to the complaint in the bud.

Preventing community sourced workplace violence, invitee workplace violence, and employee family related workplace violence requires understanding how safety threats develop from each of those source types. And then developing approaches that are specific to those safety risks.

Lack of Oversight Over Workplace Violence Sources 

Simply put, employers need to adjust their approaches to workplace violence because they lack control over people that don’t work for them. 

As a result, employers need to shift their focus beyond the more traditional use of the workplace disciplinary processes, and put more emphasis onto training employees. Especially training your employees to recognize and respond to safety threats while they’re within environments outside of an employer’s control. 

Trainings should be tailored to the different safety hazards from the other source types of violence. Some of the safety hazards are unique to the source type of violence, for example someone who enters your workplace looking for cash who tries to grab a purse, versus the safety hazards your employees face in the parking lot from community crime, an angry customer, or a former intimate partner. In that case training in parking lot safety and the buddy system would work as a strategy to avoid physical harm from all three of those workplace violence source types. 

Use the Safety Assessment Process to Rethink Your Violence Prevention Approach

The most important step to take ensure that your approach to workplace violence prevention matches the actual safety threats is conducting the safety hazard assessment. And within that process, interviewing your employees is the most critical.

Especially for community violence and invitee violence. You need to see those source types as your employees see them. For example, do you have employees that arrive or leave work in darkness? You’ll need to ask about who they notice when they approach the workplace. Are there people in the parking lot? Across the street? And if so, why are those people where they are? Sometimes it’s because they’re patrons of another business, while other times it’s because they are homeless and are camping out somewhere nearby.

Safety hazards from invitees also need to be delved into when interviewing your employees. For example, what process does your staff follow when meeting with an invitee. Do they meet 1 on 1? What space do they meet in and can they be trapped in that location by an angry or unwell client or patient. Are invitees able to walk around your location so that they can access bathrooms and other locations where an attack can happen?

Once you’ve conducted the assessment and gotten feedback from your employees you can then assess the information and develop an approach to those specific safety hazards including the strategies and skills necessary to keep safe from those safety threats.

Exiting news!!! My California Workplace Violence Prevention Manual is now available for purchase on Amazon. Click here to learn more. 

Even a single workplace violence incident can increase turnover and absenteeism rates, reduce productivity, impact your bottom line, and expose you to a five figure fine from Cal/OSHA. Schedule a free call to discuss where you are in establishing, implementing, and maintaining an effective workplace violence program. I can help you whether it’s developing your workplace violence prevention program from scratch, conducting safety hazard assessments and identifying remediation approaches, or training your employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence.