Addressing Grievance Driven Workplace Violence

For over the last year now, I've been talking about what I think is a new source type of workplace violence. It’s different from the traditional 4 source types of workplace violence.

Grievance driven violence.

I covered it last week.

And I've covered it literally 5 or 6 times over the last year. I’ve covered it so much because I think we're missing something when it comes to workplace violence.

If we want to prevent this new source type of workplace violence effectively. We’ll need to approach it differently.

If you're a small California business whose employees interact with the public, who doesn't have a full-time security team, nor a full-time compliance team, this information is going to be really important to help you fill a gap in your prevention strategy..

The ramifications of even a single incident of workplace violence are tremendous. It can cause high turnover rates and absenteeism rates for employees since they don’t feel supported. It can cause lower productivity, and effect how the public sees your organization. And that can lower your sales and your revenue

An incident of workplace violence can lead to higher insurance premiums, and regulatory fines.

Grievance driven violence is different.

It often targets the owner or operator of a business, including professionals, and you may even have to worry about your license when somebody develops a grievance driven vendetta.

In this piece today, we're going to look at addressing grievance driven violence and what you need to be doing as an employer, and what your employees are doing, in order to make sure that you're complying with California's workplace violence prevention law, and that you're doing everything that you can to keep your employees safer, while protecting your organization from liability.

I bring 30 years of investigating violence experience, including as a civil plaintiff investigator, bringing cases against employers where violence happens, as a criminal defense investigator, where I represented people who were charged with violence, and conducting internal investigations at workplaces, where workplace violence, assaults, and harassment, occurred .

For over 10 years now. I've conducted workplace violence, trainings and consultations with organizations, raging from law firms and medical practices and educational facilities, to the office of a United States senator, helping to make sure that their employees were safe from workplace violence, that they knew what to do in case the situation got out of control, and to make sure that the employers were in regulatory compliance.

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If you’re a California employer with 5–30 employees and your team interacts with the public, you’re now required to have a workplace violence prevention plan that actually works in practice, not just on paper.

If you’d like a quick, no‑obligation snapshot of where you stand, you can book a free 15‑minute Workplace Violence Compliance & Safety Snapshot call here: [Get Your Free 15‑Minute Snapshot].

When it comes to grievance driven violence, you have to think about this violence source type from an entirely different mentality.

What's happening here is we are as a society, more and more cleaved by grievance, and that filters into the workplace in a couple of different ways.

It may be political interactions in the workplace, but it can also be because we’re dealing with an economically different situation where the cost of living has spiraled out of control.

The average price of a new car is now $50,000.

My parents bought their 1st home for $17,000.

Sure there’s been some nice safety upgrades with cars, but we’re talking about 4 wheels and a motor and a way to go from point A to point B that costs $50,000.

Auto loans now average about 72 months much longer than the traditional 48 month loan. And most people remain upside down on their loans, owing more than the car is worth, for well over 4 years of that 72 months.

And despite extending out the term of the loan, car payments are the size of rent and mortgage payments.

That causes a lot of strain, and with that, people look for someone to blame. And it’s the looking for someone to blame that makes grievance driven violence different.

So if you you sell cars, or even if you service cars, where people now pay $2000-$3000 just to keep older cars running longer. And if you’re a bank that sells these budget draining car loans, people now feel resentful, and that leads to grievance

The healthcare industry too. The biggest expense increase in people’s budgets are coming from healthcare.

It's coming from higher health insurance premiums, and deductibles meaning we’re all a lot more out of pocket for healthcare coverage than we used to pay.

Even medications are much more expensive.

And again, that leads to pressure, which leads to resentment, and resentment leads to grievance.

So if you're a small medical practice.

And as a result, grievance driven workplace violence can target medical practices, pharmacies, health insurance agencies, and those that make decisions about what services are and are not covered.

So we need a practical approach for addressing what I'm calling the 5th source type of workplace violence.

First and foremost, you need to a different type of assessment. Not just your overall safety hazard your employees face.

You need to incorporate where resentment develop towards your organization.
And keep in mind, your organization does not have to be the driver of this grievance.

It can be your overall industry.

You’ll need to assess the why behind possible resentment and determine if it’s powerful enough to trigger a grievance style attack.

And then assess what that means for the safety of your employees.

Assess vulnerabilities in the work processes used, based upon potential grievances of those your employees service. And the grievances of the overall population. And whether those grievances also put you as the employer at greater risk.

Because grievance driven violence often targets the employers as well.

Assess the public comments on social media that your organization receives. But do so with one caveat.

Oftentimes, those complaints, and even death threats that come via social media, over the phone, or through email may not actually translate to violence.

As a matter of fact, the majority of workplace violence attacks are carried out by someone who never made a threat against the organization before conducting an attack

That makes it much more difficult to prevent grievance driven workplace violence because they're operating off the radar.

Once you've gone through that process, assess where your employees do their work, and who they interact with while they do their work. Employees that work out in the community or travel for work, can be more easily targeted by grievance based violence since there’s no protective infrastructure.

If you’re a builder, engineer, or architect who does public projects, you or your employees may need to attend city council meetings. If so, assess who would be at the city council meetings and what types of grievances they may experience.

Feels over the top doesn’t it. But it’s not. Grievance driven violence looks for opportunity, and sees innocent people attacked as collateral damage.

Now, on a more basic level, If you're a small medical practice, if you're a doctor, if you're a dentist office, if you're a medical spa, any of those types of things, people that are angry about access to medical care, or a botched procedure, might see you as an appropriate target for their anger.

Once you’ve looked at this different type of assessment, look at your practices, and determine what practices can be adjusted to make employees safer.

Most of the time you’ll just need to do some minor tweaks to increase employee safety.

Small employers don't have full-time security or a full-time compliance team.

Son how do you implement this stuff at your workplace day to day?

Start with situational awareness.

Everyone in your organization must not only be trained in situational awareness, they have to implement it.

It's no good to learn something that you put on the shelf.

You've got to actually use it, and you have to use it day in and day out.

Why is situational awareness so important?

Because it's literally the only thing that your employees (and yourself) can do that can actually avoid an attack.

Forget, disarming an attacker, forget, trying to de-escalate a situation.

It is literally the only safety practice you can engage in, that gives you the chance to actually avoid something completely.

And that requires practice. And not just at the workplace, since grievance driven violence can affect you, as an employer, when you're out in the community, and when you're actually at your own home, because you're at a fixed known point where someone can find you.

In addition to that, your employees need to be able to read what's going on in the environment around them so that they can detect people who are angry or can become a safety threat.

Again, that's done through situational awareness.

Violence can occur without warning, most of the people that make threats are blowing off steam. They’re not likely to launch an attack. Most attacks occur from someone who doesn't make threats.

Which makes anticipating an attack that much more difficult. So essentially your employees need to expect a potential threat wherever they are. And no what to do if one occurs.

And that means strategies to avoid physical harm. They should match your employees needs, and need to be implemented at all times.

So make sure you identify and work with people who can help your staff.

Implement these strategies because that will be their last clear chance to avoid physical harm.

So we've talked about assessment.

We've talked about recognition of what might cause someone with agreements to launch an attack.

You also have to think about where the attacks can occur.

And those attacks are most likely to occur where you are most exposed in a parking lot, or the driveway of your home.
grievance-based attacks involve a higher level of planning than most other forms of workplace violence.

These people actually do dry runs. They will do surveillance and recon.

They’ll study when people arrive at and leave from work. They’ll look at the level of exposure when going from the parking lot to the workplace.

Safety steps to counter the risk from their pre-attack surveillance can include change arrival times and departure times.

And incorporating the buddy system for your employees when they go back and forth to their car.

Incorporating this level of safety improvements can make a huge difference in how state regulators examine your current program.

And how plaintiff lawyers assess your practices on behalf of 3rd parties injured at your workplace by grievance driven violence. Since they can turn around and sue you.

Doing all of these things, lowers the risk for attack. It reduces your regulatory exposure, and the risk of a 3rd party lawsuit. And most importantly, keeps your employees and yourself safer.

If you’re reading this because you’re responsible for safety or compliance in a small California organization, the fastest next step is a short, free 15‑minute snapshot call. We’ll pressure‑test how you’d look if a regulator or plaintiff’s attorney asked tomorrow, and flag your top risks.

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