New Business, No History: Why That Makes Your Safety Assessment Harder, Not Easier

If you’re a new California employer you face a challenge when it comes to creating your required workplace violence prevention plan that other employers don’t face. (Prefer video? Watch here)

As a new employer, whether you’re opening a cafe, a boutique, a professional practice, or your a solopreneur, who needs to hire because you’re growing, not having employee input, or a history of prior incidents that you can assess, makes the process of identifying safety hazards more difficult.

So as a new employer how do you conduct a safety hazard assessment when you can’t use these traditional assessment tools?

Why Are Safety Hazard Assessments So Important?

A safety hazard assessment is the foundation for your workplace violence prevention program. 

California’s labor code 6401.9 requires that you identify, evaluate, and correct workplace violence safety hazards that your employees face. 

And then to base everything that goes into an implementing an effective workplace violence prevention program: training, work practice changes, staff roles, and your investigation process on knowing what the specific safety hazards that your employees actually face.

Why Is Identifying Workplace Violence Hazards Harder for New Employers?

But here’s the catch: California requires your employees to be actively involved in identifying those safety hazards and in developing approaches to correct those safety hazards.

But if you’re hiring for the first time, and your employees haven’t been on the job long enough to be able to assess their work situation for safety hazards. They might not even been on the job at all.

California also requires employers to maintain a violent incident log, which documents specific information regarding any workplace violence incidents or near incidents (if they’re significant). And the fundamental reason for maintaining that log is to be able to use that information to assess how effectively your identifying and correcting safety hazards

But new employers haven’t had any incidents where they can use the data to assess for potential safety hazards and assess your effectiveness correcting them.

I spent 30 years conducting investigations into violence at workplaces often for plaintiff attorneys. The attorneys had me conduct safety hazard assessments to identify why the violence occurred and where employers went wrong. Sometimes I interviewed current or former employees, but that wasn’t always possible to do so I had to be able to identify workplace violence safety hazards in other ways.

I wanted to help small California employers, including new employers, not only comply with California’s workplace violence prevention requirements, but to actually protect your employees and your organization from the harms of real world workplace violence.  My book Is Your Workplace Actually Safe? can help you do that.

What Influences Safety Hazard Assessments?

Here’s how I went about conducting safety hazard assessments when I couldn’t interview employees.

To understand how to approach conducting safety hazard assessments when you don’t have the ability to use the typical approaches, you need to understand where safety hazards originate from. 

These will apply to employees that do their work at someone else home or place of business. But you’ll have the additional challenge of not being able to see the locations first hand.

These three elements are the most relevant factors in generating safety hazards for many workplaces:

• The exterior and interior physical environment of the workplace including the surrounding neighborhoods.
• The clients, customers, and patients that you serve.
• Work practices that your employees follow.

How Does Your Workplaces’ Physical Environment Influence Safety?

When it comes to safety hazards, location matters. Neighborhoods have their own levels of risk. Some more than others. But there is no location that’s immune from being a potential safety hazard.

So even if your workplace is located in a safer area, you still need to understand the potential and types of issues that can lead to crime or violence from within the surrounding community.

Parking lots are high risks for violence. FBI statistics identify parking lots and garages as the 3rd most common location for a violent assault or killing. If your workplace has a parking lot for either employees or the public to use for parking, that will need to be part of your safety hazard assessment.

You’ll also need to evaluate lighting, especially if employees, customers, clients, or patients will come and go during the early morning or into the evening.

Ingress and egress should also be part of your safety hazard assessment. At some workplaces access into the location may be controlled. But, again there’s no perfect way to secure a workplace. Especially if your business is accessible to the public.

You’ll also need to examine interior layouts, such as lobbies, waiting rooms, and conference rooms, where employees can be trapped, and people can linger.

You’ll also need to look for obstacles, that can create hiding places for someone to attack from, as well as things like posters in the window that can create block your view to the outside preventing employees from seeing if any concerning activity is happening outside of the building.

How Do Invitees (Clients, Customers, Patients, Vendors, and Contractors) Impact Safety?

Invitees are people who come to your workplace, or your employees go to their home or workplace, as part of your ordinary course of business. They’re literally invited into your workplace.

They’re the most common source of workplace violence incidents. And that makes them a critical part of your safety hazard assessment. Often invitees are accompanied by family members and friends too.

So you’ll need to look at who you’ll be serving with your organization, and how they can impact employee safety. 

Safety hazards can also come from vendors, and the people they hire, and also for contractors too. 

How Do Your Employees Work practices Impact Safety?

As a new employer you’ll be implementing practices for your employees to follow. These practices have a direct bearing on safety hazards. 

Since you’re just starting out with employees, you have the benefit of being able to design and implement work practices that incorporate employee safety from the get go. The only way to do that is to conduct an assessment of the practice as you identify it and  prepare to implement it.

Run through the different practices and look for safety issues that were not factored in. 

Work practices that can impact safety hazards include reception area practices, visitor notification practices, visitor supervision, meeting one on one with clients and others, work practices for those who work in the community, and determining what doors remain unlocked or open during work hours and which ones should remain closed.

There are as many different types of work practices that can impact safety hazards as there are types of work that your organization performs.

So here’s what you, as a new employer, can do right now to get started on conducting your safety hazard assessment. Identify which of these three elements you think will factor into the types of safety hazards your employees might face, and determine how to identify the safety hazards connected to that element.

What some additional help on identifying your employees’ workplace violence safety hazards and what approaches to take to correct them, my book “Is Your Workplace Actually Safe?”shows you what to do so that you don’t just have something in writing, but will protect your employees and your organization from real world violence.