The Key To Cost-Effective Workplace Violence Prevention

Have you heard them? 

The naysayers claiming that California’s groundbreaking workplace violence prevention law will cause businesses to close.

Some of these folks are doom and gloom spreaders who only see the negative side of things. Others oppose any type of government regulation no matter how beneficial those requirements can be. And finally, others just aren’t familiar enough with workplace violence to understand how widespread it is, and how harmful it is to not just the employees subjected to the violence, but to the organizations where the violence occurs.

The law is a good law. One that when implemented effectively better protects employees and the financial health of the organization. 

It’s an effective enough law that several other states are modeling their own workplace violence prevention laws on California’s law.

For small employers, and especially for those with 1-9 employees, ( 87% of all California employer organizations) who work at workplaces that are accessible to the public, and therefore, must comply with the law, keeping costs down starts with implementing the law’s different requirements efficiently.

But before we look at what that means, I need to first address the naysayers. 

The cost to your organization of not implementing the law can be far greater than the costs to implement the law. It’s those costs that can force an organization to close.

The financial risk to employers who don’t implement a workplace violence prevention plan come from multiple sources:

• Not having a plan risks fines from Cal/OSHA from $18,000 to $25,000 per violation. And you can receive a separate fine for each element of the plan that you don’t have.
• Not having an effective workplace violence prevention plan risks third-party civil lawsuits brought by an invitee, such as a customer, client, patient, vendor, contractor or other member of the public, who gets injured by workplace violence at your location. These cases don’t fall under workers’ compensation. Settlements and court awards for a third-party workplace assault can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or higher if the injuries are severe enough.
• And not having an effective prevention plan can cost you an additional 50% cash out of pocket payment to your employee on top of the full worker’s compensation amount.

The financial risk of not having a prevention plan outweighs the cost of implementing one. Especially if you can implement your prevention plan that meets California’s requirements in a cost-effective way. 

Doing so looks different for an organization with 4 employees than it does for one with 100 employees. And it looks different for small employers who have to do all of the work versus those that have compliance, safety, and HR teams.

Efficiency is the key to cost-effectiveness. Grouping elements that are connected together makes sense. And it lowers your costs too.

California’s requirements for employee involvement, effectiveness, and specificity, are not going to be met through a generic online training. To keep your costs down, you’ve got to structure the different aspects of creating and implementing your plan in the most efficient way.

Since California requires active employee involvement in all phases of plan creation, implementation, and training, you should look for an approach that allows you to meet that requirement across these different elements as efficiently as possible.

Conducting interviews, and walk-throughs, with your employees allows you to combine the safety hazard assessment, and remediation processes together. And doing it this way allows you to identify the types of training that your employees feel will be most beneficial for them. 

Doing so allows you to address the law’s requirements for employee involvement, specificity of safety hazards identification and their remediation, and for effectiveness in practice and not just in theory, while checking three things off of your list.

Developing your complaint and investigation processes in one step instead of separately, ensures that they work well together (both effective and efficient). And at the same time you can develop your violent incident log, and an incident debriefing process too. 

That’s four more things you can check off your list.

Designing an incident response approach, including if you have the staff for it, an incident response team, and a communication process in case of an incident checks the boxes for clarifying processes and responsibilities, and allows you to address the requirements for accountability too.

And when it comes to trainings, there’s some efficiencies that can be built into that process too. It’s best to think of some training as bookkeeping type trainings, i.e. training on the plan itself, that can be done quickly with minimal effort, while other trainings, like strategies to avoid physical harm, are specialized and require more work.

You can group train on the bookkeeping types of more general trainings, and combine the hazard remediation processes with training in strategies to avoid physical harm in such a way that checks the boxes for employee involvement, specificity, and effectiveness.

Not every employer has a compliance team or safety team to handle the plan creation and implementation process. To help those smaller employers that don’t, I’m developing a great DIY resource. It’s a guidebook and implementation package that not only shows you what to do to comply with California’s workplace violence prevention plan requirements, but, helps you implement them too. Keep an eye out for an announcement soon.