Training Employees in Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm

California now requires employers to train employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence. 

This requirement raises an important question that employers must answer.

What strategies will be the most effective at helping your employees avoid being physically harmed from workplace violence? When it comes to workplace violence, if your approach is not effective, your employees have a greater risk of being physically harmed. And that is specifically what California is trying to prevent by this requirement.

We’ll answer that question in this piece.

In making that decision, employers need to understand the violence, and its sources, that are most likely to be directed at their employees. And then to train them in the most effective ways to avoid physical harm from those specific types of violence.

Workplace Violence Statistics and How to Use Them to Prioritize Training Approaches

Although workplace shootings generate a lot of media attention, and employer focus, and were the driving force behind California’s new workplace violence prevention law, they represent only a tiny fraction of the workplace violence incidents that lead to employee injuries and missed workdays. 

As the statistics show, active shooter training does not address the types of violence that is most likely to injure your employees. 

According to Workplace Violence, 2019, a federal report jointly prepared by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety, for the year 2019, intentional shootings in the workplace caused 340 injuries that resulted in employees missing workdays. 

While not an insignificant number, especially to those directly affected by that workplace violence, that number is dwarfed by the 37,210 total nonfatal injuries from workplace violence that resulted in injured employees missing work that same year. Injuries from shootings accounted for less than one-tenth of one percent of all of the injuries from workplace violence that year that resulted in missed workdays.

From 2015-2019, there were 529,000 nonfatal injuries from workplace violence where employees received medical treatment in hospital emergency rooms. 83% of those injuries were from physical assaults, such as hitting, kicking, or beating. 

When considering the types of training to provide to your employees in order to help them avoid physical harm, statistically, focusing on physical assaults makes far more sense than focusing on a live shooter approach. Yes, live shooter situations can and do happen in the workplace, but in terms of preparing your employees for the types of physical harm they will most likely face, the statistics make clear where to focus your training approach.

From 2015-2019, Rape and sexual assault, which is a separate workplace violence category from physical assaults, accounted for over 2% of the nonfatal injuries in the workplace that required an ER visit.  

Thus, although they receive much less media attention than workplace shootings, sexual assaults, accounted for a significantly higher percentage of those injured by workplace violence than did workplace shootings. And as such, should be a higher priority for training employees, especially female employees, in strategies to avoid physical harm.

Reviewing the likelihood of injuries based upon the types of violence that your employees are most likely to face, can help guide employers to the most effective types of training in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence.  

And assessing the workplace violence source types: community, invitee, co-worker, or domestic violence related, that provides the greatest risk of physical harm to your employees.  

Training your employees in a broad based approach that addresses your employees’ most likely sources of injury from workplace violence is the best way to help them avoid physical harm from workplace violence.

California new workplace violence law has gone into effect. It requires employers to implement a workplace violence prevention program, including providing training employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence. 

I put together a free guide to help employers ensure that their violence prevention program is effective. It’s based on what I learned from 30+ years of conducting civil, criminal, and workplace investigations into real life violence incidents, as well as what I implemented in order to keep myself safe while working in some very dangerous places. I’ve helped employers implement these approaches into their workplace violence prevention programs for over a decade.  

Violence is Chaotic and Non-Linear. So a Flexible, Multi-Strategy Approach, is Most Effective In Helping Your Employees To Avoid Physical Harm 

When identifying strategies to train your employees to help them avoid being physically harmed, it’s important to recognize that violence is chaotic and non-linear. It does not follow a specific sequence. 

Sometimes there is an opportunity to completely avoid a potentially violent situation by recognizing the safety hazard in advance, other times there may be a chance to prevent a situation from escalating into violence, but at other times violence ensues immediately with no chance to avoid or de-escalate.

For example, mastering situational awareness should be a critical part of your training. But, situational awareness may not be as helpful when trying to avoid physical harm from an invitee already working in close proximity with your employee, since being so close prevents recognizing a safety threat from far enough away to avoid it.

Training in de-escalation should also be part of your employees’ training to avoid physical harm, but a physical assault can occur before your employee has any chance to try de-escalation. Some potential attackers will telegraph their intention to turn violent with enough time to try de-escalation, while others do not.

Thus, helping your employees have the ability to respond flexibly under different circumstances is critical to their safety. 

To do so, your employees will need to be trained in a variety of approaches, so that they always have a fall back strategy regardless of what takes place. 

Current and Former Co-Worker Workplace Violence Is the Easiest for Employers to Prevent Physical Harm. Community, Invitee, and Domestic Violence are Much Harder to Keep Physical Violence From Occurring

It’s also important, as you focus on strategies to train employees in to avoid physical harm from workplace violence, that you recognize that one source type of workplace violence, co-worker on co-worker violence, is far easier to prevent physical harm than those involving community based crime, invitee violence, or domestic violence related source types. 

Employers have the greatest control and ability to prevent physical harm with co-worker violence. Employers can literally nip co-worker violence in the bud.

An employer who takes bullying and harassment in the workplace seriously, and who utilizes an effective complaint and investigation process, as required under the new law, can prevent co-worker violence. And by extension, physical harm to employees.

There are right ways, and wrong ways to terminate an employee. Employers that treat employees with empathy, and a willingness to help an employee that must be terminated, will greatly reduce the likelihood of an ex-employee returning to the workplace to commit an act of violence.

However, when it comes to community related violence, invitee violence, and domestic violence spilling over into the workplace, employers have far less ability to prevent that type of violence due to having less control over the process. 

And the nature of violence from those source types is far less telegraphed than co-worker violence typically is.

And because those types of situations are harder to keep from leading to violence, you have to factor in the lack of employer control into the strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence.

Effective Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm from Workplace Violence

A combined training approach that provides your employees with the skills they need to avoid physical harm from workplace violence is the best approach to keeping them safe. 

Because of the chaotic, and non-linear manner of violence, your employees will not be able to try just one approach to see if it will work before trying some other approach. Your employees will need to be able to read the situation as it is, and select the approach most likely able to work at avoiding physical harm, based upon that quick read. Think of these strategies as tools in a tool kit. Your employees should be able to pull out the right tool for the right job.

• Situational awareness:This approach is critical to recognizing violence threats from community sources, when working at a client’s place of business or in their home, and to parking lot safety, where domestic violence and sexual assaults are most likely to occur. This approach allows your employees to recognize a potential threat to their safety with enough time in order to avoid it or formulate a plan to address it.
• De-escalation: There’s an art to de-escalating a tense situation, and when it can be done, it can keep employees from being physically harmed. It’s your last chance to avoid physically interacting with a potential attacker. The challenge is to be able to recognize when de-escalation is possible, since from a safety standpoint in order to de-escalate, you’ll need to be in close proximity to the agitated person. And that makes it easier for a physical attack to occur.
• Communicating Safety Concerns to Others: Being able to alert others who can then assist you with an agitated person in a way that does not increase their agitation can be effective at avoiding being physically attacked. This is especially helpful when dealing with invitee violence, and for reception area people dealing with a community member that enters the workplace. 
• The Buddy System: This strategy may be an extension of the communication strategy, but it can also be used by sending two people on a work assignment in the community, to a client’s home, or workplace. It can also be used to reduce the risk of being physically harmed in an employee parking lot, from domestic violence that spills over into the workplace, or from sexual assault.
• Changing the Dynamics of an Attack: A physical attack can occur suddenly and without warning. Because an attacker knows that he is going to attack before launching the attack, he’ll typically do so when he believes there’s some vulnerability. Being able to force an attacker off of his plan of attack at the onset of an attack, is critical to keeping your employees from being physically harmed by an attack. And this strategy helps to rebalance the one-sided nature of a sudden attack.
• Self-defense: Most attacks are over and done in just 7 seconds. If your employees cannot defend themselves, they will definitely be physically harmed if not killed. Being able to defend against an attack creates the opportunity to exit an attack safely. Self-defense is the last clear chance to avoid physical harm from workplace violence if there was no time to implement other approaches, or if those approaches fail.

Learn more about strategies to avoid physical harm.