Are You Hearing Your Employees About Safety?

Is parking lot safety part of your workplace violence prevention program? 

If you listen to your employees it would be.  

Not only is it a good business practice to listen to your employees, but California’s workplace violence prevention law requires you to do so. 

And not only must you listen to them, but the law requires you to use their input when addressing the specific safety hazards they face, including in the types of training they feel will best help them avoid physical harm from workplace violence. 

Employees, regardless of the type of organization, or where they work, put parking lot safety as one of their top safety concerns. 

That’s because employees are vulnerable in parking areas to a physical assault from all four workplace violence source types: community, invitee, co-worker, and employee personnel connection. 

And FBI statistics support those safety concerns. Parking lots and garages are the 3rd most common location for physical assaults and murders. And that includes workplace parking lots too. 

For an employer, training employees in parking area safety, is a great way to show that you hear them about their safety concerns. That you have their collective backs. 

In this piece, I look at why parking lot safety is such a big matter to employees, and what you can do to keep employees safer from violent attacks when they’re in your workplace parking lot or garage.

Training your employees in strategies to avoid physical harm from workplace violence is the most important; yet, least understood requirement in California’s workplace violence prevention law. My free, on-demand, training, based upon what I learned during my 30 years of investigating violence in the workplace and in the community, takes the mystery out of training your employees in strategies to avoid physical harm. Doing so helps keep your employees safer while complying with California’s requirements. This training is available on demand so you can watch it when it’s convenient for you. 

Why Parking Lots are So Dangerous for Your Employees 

Parking lots create safety hazards for your employees due to the confluence of multiple factors. Here are some of the safety challenges inherent to parking lots and should be covered as part of your workplace violence prevention program:

•  Vehicles can be used as weapons. Vehicles are super easy to use as a weapon. Most passenger vehicles weigh from 3000-6000 lbs. And many vehicles can accelerate from 0-30 mph in under 3 seconds. A vehicle can be used to target one person or many people. In New Orleans the driver of a pick up truck killed 14 people and injured many more. And just recently a driver in Vancouver killed 11 people and injured dozens more. I investigated a domestic violence killing in the parking area of a bar in which the victim was struck and killed by her boyfriend’s pickup. 
•  Parking lots are isolating leaving employees vulnerable. Employees walk back and forth within a parking lot at least twice a day. And because parking lots are designed to be transitory, so an employee may be by herself in the parking area, or when there are only a few other people present. The inherent isolation in a parking lot leaves employees vulnerable to an attack.
•  Parking lots and garages are accessible to the public. Accessibility, especially on foot, is a design function of parking lots. Most places of employment have employee parking located where the public parks as well. But even when employee parking is separated, and controlled by gate access, it’s still super easy for someone, especially a member of the public, a client, customer or other invitee, and even an employee’s personal connection to just walk right in and encounter your employee.
•  Vehicles along with physical features obstruct views and create hiding places. Vehicles, especially SUVs, vans, and pickups, can obstruct your employees’ view, as can columns, dumpsters, and utilities making it difficult to see a person waiting to attack. They also provide cover for someone to launch an attack from. For female employees, who face higher rates of domestic violence, and sexual assault in the workplace, parking areas by their design and function make it easy for an attacker to lay in wait. And assigned parking makes it easier to determine if an employee is present at the workplace.
•  Lighting is often a secondary consideration. Lighting is seldom a primary factor in parking area design. Flow of vehicular traffic, and accessibility to the building, typically come before lighting considerations. When treated as an afterthought, lighting loses its deterrent effect, especially when it comes to employees arriving before sunrise or leaving after nightfall.  

Parking Lot Strategies to Avoid Physical Harm  

While there are limits to what types of physical changes that can be made to workplace parking areas, perhaps moving dumpster and other potential portable obstructiions, and ensuring that there is sufficient exterior lighting on the building to reduce the amount of shadows, there are various parking lot strategies to avoid physical harm that can be implemented to help keep your employees safer. These include: 

•  Situational awareness training. The single most important strategy for parking lot safety is for your employees to develop situational awareness skills. Situational awareness is the awareness of the environment around you and the people within it. It’s the only skill that will allow your employees to recognize, and avoid, a potential safety threat before they have to engage with it. Situational awareness is not automatic for most people and must be learned and practiced until it beomes automatic. Situational awareness is especially helpful for early arrivals who can conduct a quick reconaissance of the parking lot by driving through it before parking their vehicle. Doing so allows them to look for people who don’t belong there. 
•  The buddy system. There is safety in numbers. And when it comes to workplace parking area safety, this is especially true. An employee walking by herself in a parking lot is more likely to be attacked than two or more employees walking together. Employers should implement a process where employees, who have safety concerns, can request to be accompanied to their vehicles by other employees. In addition, employees who arrive at work or leave work when it’s dark should be trained to meet first and enter the parking lot together, or to wait in a locked car until others arrive so that they can safely go together through the parking lot. And those that leave when it’s dark out, should leave together, iand if necessary walk to one of the vehicles, and then drive together to the next person’s vehicle.
•  Early arrival and late departure employees should be equipped with tactical flashlights. When navigating a parking lot in the early morning and nighttime hours, having a tactical flashlight in hand can provide protection as a quick flashl of ight into the eyes of a person creates the opportuntity to get away from that person as that person will need a second or two to reorient following a quick flash of light. Tactical flashlights are small, just wider than a person’s hand,  thumb switch activated flashlights. They usually come with a jagged beezle, and these flashlights can be used to strike or scratch a would be attacker by swinging it like you would a hammer.
•  Employees who leave later than others should move their cars closer to exits. Whether they start work later due to different work shifts, or have to work later for other reasons, employees who will be working later than other employees should reposition their cars to be closer to the exits during the course of the workday. Parking closer to the exits makes it easier to see from inside the building if there is someone around their car, allowing them to remain safely inside the workplace. And it also reduces the amount of time that they are exposed to an assailant by shortening the distance they’ll need to walk to get to their vehicle.

California now requires all employers to establish, implement, and maintain an effective workplace violence prevention program. I’ve got a great workplace violence prevention checklist that will help you determine what you need to do to comply with California law, while helping your staff keep safer from violence. You can download the checklist here. 

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