There's No Making Whole

There's no pound of cure once workplace violence happens. All we've got is that ounce of prevention.

I saw this time and time again.

The plaintiff lawyers I conducted investigations for used the term "making whole" for the compensation they sought on behalf of their clients — or their survivors — for the trauma of violence.

I sat in enough of those meetings to hear the same lawyers tell their clients: no amount of money could bring back their loved one, or undo the harm done. They were right.

Marissa

Marissa Mathy-Zvaifler was a 16-year-old girl full of life, with a generous, caring spirit. A genuine bright light, extinguished far too soon, in a horrific way.

I never got to meet Marissa. She was murdered before I had the chance. That happened on more than a few of the cases I worked, bringing lawsuits against employers when violence occurred at their workplaces.

Through time spent with her parents and her friends, I built a portrait of who she was. One we'd use at settlement. Her family and friends carried on her giving spirit by creating a foundation in her name.

Marissa was strangled to death by Dominic Akers, a 22-year-old employee of the Sunshine Theater, where she'd gone to see her favorite band play an all-ages show.

The theater hired him as a custodian and scheduled him during the hours teenagers filled the building. He saw her. Stalked her. Killed her there.

From a workplace violence liability standpoint, this was an incident waiting to happen. Before he was hired, Akers had been convicted of sexually molesting a young relative. He wasn't closely supervised. He was placed on a shift full of teens. Not good.

There were multiple defendants in the civil case — a series of shake-your-head decisions made by people who should have known better.

But no matter who was held accountable, it didn't bring Marissa back. It didn't lessen what her family and friends carried.

What Led Me Here

As a parent, few cases hit me the way this one did. More than any other, it's what led me to workplace violence prevention consulting and training.

It drove home the importance of preventing violence before it happens — and that the best way to do that was helping employers put processes in place that protected not just their employees, but everyone who walked through their door.

Civil lawsuits usually only impact those sued. Other employers don't change course because they read about someone else getting sued.

I started with my plaintiff lawyer clients. In one month, three different firms reached out to have me put together violence prevention training — including strategies to avoid physical harm — for their staff, because each of them was dealing with a real safety threat.

I was doing this work long before California's workplace violence prevention law existed. And thanks to it, I was able to help those firms fix the real-world safety problems they were actually facing.

I started with small employers and nonprofits — financial services organizations, daycare centers, religious institution volunteers, a sorority. I liked working with people who didn't have compliance or safety staff of their own, and who carried a level of individual risk that larger employers didn't.

Then a court administrator reached out. Even with full-time security from the local sheriff's department, the administrator wanted the court's administrative staff trained — along with the department working directly with people charged with felonies whose cases hadn't been adjudicated yet, and the juvenile probation officers.

That expanded the work into government agencies — finding the holes in a court's security. From there, I began working directly with judges who'd already had some law enforcement training, and eventually with the entire statewide staff of a U.S. Senator, whose team had previously trained with the U.S. Capitol Police.

I also trained a city department whose staff worked directly with members of the public going through serious instability. They came to me because the training they'd already had didn't match the threats they were actually facing.

Everything I brought to that work came from what I'd learned through the investigations I conducted — both for plaintiff attorneys after the fact, and internally for employers trying to get ahead of it.

Where I Landed

Eventually I realized what I loved most was working with smaller organizations — 30 employees or fewer, with no one dedicated to compliance or safety.

Their people were exposed to certain sources of workplace violence in ways larger organizations weren't, and a single serious incident could bankrupt them.

Working with smaller employers also meant working with people who didn't have a prevention program in place yet — and because of what their people were actually up against, they were willing to do more than just go through the motions.

The Ounce of Prevention

Prevention is the only thing that works before the fact. It's the only ounce that matters, because there's no pound of cure once violence happens.

That's what led me here.

I've been putting together a workplace violence prevention book for small employers — to help them build a plan that actually protects their people and their business before anything happens.

I'll have more information on that soon.