Protecting Invitees from Workplace Violence is Good Business!

Workplace violence prevention. That’s just for protecting your employees right?

Not if you want to protect your business’s bottom line. 

And yes, as a business owner your safety matters too. And you should make sure you have the relevant safety skills. But that’s not what I’m focusing on here. 

When it comes to protecting your business’s operation and your bottom line, it’s critical that your workplace violence prevention program addresses the safety of your clients, customers, patients, and other “invitees” that come to your place of business as a part of your regular course of business.

Looking out for their safety isn’t just about doing the right thing. Though that’s a good enough reason on its own.

But, as a business, you have a “duty” to protect invitees from harm while they’re at your business. And that duty to a 3rd party means that unlike under worker’s comp, there are no caps on your liability.

And that means your business faces much higher dollar amounts if you’re sued following a violent attack on invitees.

Here’s what you can do to help ensure the safety of those who are invited to your workplace.

During the 30 years I spent building cases for attorneys, I worked on many lawsuits against businesses after an invitee was injured or killed by violence at the business. And I learned what does and doesn’t work when it comes to preventing violence from preparing cases over real life  violence.

Premises Liability and The Risks to Invitees. Violence targeting invitees can come from multiple source types: people from the surrounding community, including those who come to your work location with the intent to commit a crime, from other invitees, and your own employees too.

This type of workplace violence falls under premises liability. That type of claim arises, when a person is injured or killed at your location from a foreseeable safety hazard that should have been remedied but was not.

Your liability is based upon whether you “knew or should have known” about the safety hazard as a business owner is responsible for looking for and correcting apparent safety hazards.

Including those safety hazards that originate from a person rather than the physical environment itself.

I once worked on a case where our client was stabbed numerous times by a man who had, over the course of several days, robbed several store patrons in the store’s parking lot. Store employees, including security, had been made aware of the man and his commission of crimes on their premises, but did nothing to address the issue.

They didn’t call the police, or increase parking lot patrols, as they should have done once the initial complaint came in. Store employees did fill out internal incident reports, but that’s as far as it went.

The business had a reputation for never settling lawsuits, but did so in our clients’ case because there was no viable way for the store’s attorneys to counter the extent to which the store was aware of the safety threat the attacker posed.. 

Assessing Invitee Safety Hazards. Start by conducting an assessment of the safety hazards that your invitees face when they come to your workplace. Doing so is actually required under CA’s workplace violence prevention law.

You should conduct interviews with employees who regularly work with invitees. Although they’re used to seeing safety hazards from their own perspective, you should be able to use the information they provide to identify safety hazards for invitees too. 

Next, examine your workplace’s physical layout including the lighting, doors, windows, and any obstructions that can hinder movement or be used by a potential attacker including parking columns, and dumpsters.

Once you’ve identified the safety hazards, identify ways of remedying those safety hazards.

Remedying Identified Safety Hazards. There are different approaches to use to remedy identified safety hazards including training employees in practices that will lessen the risks to invitees while they’re at your workplace, and tenant improvements that address physical premises issues.

You may also need to address the interior of the workplace to eliminate areas that form bottle necks where invitees (and employees) can be isolated by an attacker. 

Safeguarding the workplace for invitees from people coming to your place of business to steal, whether it’s from your business itself, or catalytic converters from cars parked in your parking lot. Also ensuring that the guest and invitee check in process takes invitee safety into consideration, including using sign in sheets, badges, escorts, and notification of the person they’re coming to see.

Here’s what not to do. I once worked on a case at a mall, where our client was a young child who was sexually molested by a predator, while she and her siblings were inside an arcade. 

Unwisely, the arcade was situated right next to the food court. Providing a clear line of sight of the kids going into the arcade from the food court.

And no one from the mall was assigned to monitor the food court. As a result, the pedophile literally sat in the food court for hours on end, without being asked to move along at any point, while waiting for a victim.

Further, it was dark inside the arcade, with many obstructions that blocked the line of sight of the employees, and the employees did not conduct regular walk throughs making it an ideal location for an attack.

Implementation. Once your assessment is completed, the safety hazards identified, and remedies developed, you still have to implement those corrections. That includes training your staff in safety practices that help protect invitees. And making physical changes to the workplace such as repositioning lighting, and removing obstructions, and locations where a person can position himself to attack an invitee.

What happens when a business owner does not take the time to identify safety hazards and make necessary changes to improve invitee safety. And then someone is violently attacked. That’s where I came in. Lawyers hired me to conduct our own investigation (assessment) to determine liability. Often in our lawsuits, we sought to force the business owner to incorporate needed safety improvements that were not done.

Reducing Invitee Safety Risks from Employees. If an invitee attacks one of your employees, your employees’ claim is likely covered under workers comp. But, if one of your employees attacks an invitee, that too goes to premises liability with no limits on damages.

And that risks your business’s bottom line. Possibly for many months.

Business owners sometimes hire an employee with a propensity for violence. If you failed to conduct a background check or other approaches to identify that propensity for violence, and that employee attacks an invitee, you can be held liable for that attack.

In addition to a premises liability claim, that type of incident can also fall under negligent hiring, or if you were alerted to the employee’s propensity for violence, such as this threatening another employee, and you took no action to address his conduct, you could face a claim for  negligent retention. These third party claims have the ability to harm your business’s bottom line.

Avoiding the risk of hiring someone with a propensity for violence requires examining your hiring practices. Are you doing a pre-employment background investigations? Are you updating the background investigations that were initially done in order to catch anything that’s happened since the person was hired?

Are you adequately investigating allegations of employee on employee misconduct? California requires that you implement an effective investigation practice, and failing to do so can be used by an invitee’s lawyer to show you knew about a problem employee and took no action to address it.

An effective complaint and investigation process should focus on trying to get to the truth about what occurred during an incident. Investigations should never be performed with a predetermined pre-textual outcome in mind. 

I’ve reviewed enough internal investigations to be able to identify an internal investigation that had a predetermined outcome. Not only is discerning such investigations easy to do, but doing that type of investigation can really increase your liability levels.

And finally, insurance policies often do not cover an intentional assault by one of your employees on an invitee, and as such, leave your business on the hook when that happens.

If you like what we’ve covered here, and want to learn more about our workplace violence prevention services, you can learn more here.