Is My Workplace Violence Plan Good Enough?

As a small employer you are the “compliance team”.  One of the many responsibilities that falls on your shoulders.

Since 2024 California has required any employer whose employee(s), even if you have only one, are accessible to the public to have a workplace violence prevention plan. And for workplaces that aren’t accessible to the public? You still need a plan if you have 10 employees or more at your place of employment.

For a lot of small employers, the easiest way to comply with those requirements was to grab a fill-in-the-blanks plan template and sub in your organization’s info. Doing so allowed you to get back to business as quickly as possible.

But a fill-in-the-blanks plan usually won't meet California's workplace violence law, because the law requires the plan to be effective, specific to your workplace, and built on procedures developed with your employees.

In fact, California Labor Code 6401.9, which was created by the workplace violence prevention law, uses the term “effective“ (or one of its variants) 10 times. It uses the term “procedures” 13 times, and the term “specific” appears 2 times.

Admittedly, few people count the number of times a word appears when reading through a law. But because I spent 30 years building cases for plaintiff attorneys when violence happened at a workplace, I know that for the state, repetition means emphasis, on what employers should focus on. 

Do employees have to be involved in the plan?

California didn’t create its workplace violence prevention law to be a thorn in the side of small employers. It created the law to keep people safer.

Subdivision (c)(2)(B) requires "Effective procedures to obtain the active involvement of employees and authorized employee representatives in developing and implementing the plan." 

In fact, your employees’ involvement in the entire workplace violence prevention process is a top priority for the state. So much so that it’s one of the first "Effective procedures" that the law lists.

A template that you fill out at your desk doesn’t do the heavy lifting needed to help you keep your people safer. You need to work through the processes with your employees, and determine based upon their input where their safety risks comes from. And how to address those vulnerabilities to minimize their likelihood of happening.

California’s requirement for employee involvement means that a plan you throw together from a template isn’t going to cut it. The only way for you to get to effective, specific procedures is from the people doing the work.

And as someone who has conducted around 12,000 witness interviews, I can tell you unequivocally that interviewing your employees is the best way to do that. 

Interviews allow you to ask follow up questions, and to dig deeper.

And doing so is especially important if there haven’t been any workplace violence incidents. 

Interviews will help you to identify near misses: When violence could have developed but didn’t. Interviewing your employees about those near misses helps you to assess both the safety hazards, and the approaches you need to train your employees in, so they can avoid those safety hazards. 

And that is how you make your prevention plan more effective.

What does 'effective' mean in California's workplace violence law?

California never formally defines the word effective. But the whole purpose of the law is to keep your employees safer, and to make sure they know how to do that actively. 

When I built cases after a violent incident, nobody asked whether the employer had a plan. They asked whether anyone followed it. That’s what “effective” means in practice: not what’s written, but what actually happens when it counts.

That’s why California’s law doesn’t call for a set it and forget it approach. Your plan must be implemented. 

And then you need to reassess what you’ve put in place including by checking in with your employees.

Based upon the information you get from reassessing your employees safety risks, and whether the procedures you’ve trained them in are working as intended, you’ll be able to determine what is and isn’t effective.

It’s an active rather than static process that’s based upon your employees’ actual experiences.

Does my plan have to be specific to my business?

The word specific only appears twice in the law’s requirements. But as you can see generic won’t cut it. Especially when it pertains to determining your employees’ safety hazards, and when it comes to assessing work practices and how they affect safety.

The safety risks a dentist’s office faces (agitated patients or family members, an open waiting area where invitees can interact, and a front desk check in area that’s open and accessible to those in the waiting area), are different from a small coffee shop’s (cash, nighttime hours, one person on shift).

Every workplace is different, and no fill-in-the-blanks plan will be specific enough for your safety needs.

What if I already have a violence prevention plan from 2024?

Having a plan was a great first step. But if you’ve not revisited your plan since you created it, you’ll need to do so. Enforcement is already here, and it’s about to get more specific because California will finish finalizing the regulations for the law by the end of the year.

Here’s what you should do to ensure that your plan is good enough:

• Pull out your plan
• Interview your employees
• Review the work practice changes you’ve made to see if they’re still relevant or if they need to be updated
• Review your violent incident log and use information from the log to revise how you reduce safety risks, and how you handle incidents and near incidents
• Look at the strategies to avoid physical harm you’ve trained your employees in to make sure they’re actually effective

Use that information to update your prevention plan and implement the changes needed to keep your employees safer and protect your organization from regulatory fines and third party lawsuits.

My book, Is Your Workplace Actually Safe?, shows you how to tell a plan that protects your people from one that only looks good on paper. It’s in final production now, and it’ll only be available on my site.

Get on the early list and I’ll tell you the day it’s out.