Workplace Violence Has Changed. Has Your Prevention Plan?

Workplace violence has changed. Has your prevention plan changed too?

Look, one of the ways that we've always approached workplace violence is, that there are 4 source types of workplace violence. Most people think about disgruntled current or former employees. Maybe they think about patients or customers. Maybe they think about the person that breaks into a business or conducts an armed robbery, or they even think about domestic violence. 

But that's not really the case anymore.

It really has changed, and here are some examples of how..

Last night's episode at the White House correspondence dinner.

The guy that perpetrated the workplace violence there.

He didn't know any of these people attending the event, but he carried a grievance, and acted upon that grievance.

Now there's a 2nd component.

He was really smart.

He went to Cal Tech. And he used his intelligence to plan out this attack.

And he traveled clear across the country in order to carry it out.

But he's not the first one to do so.

You likely remember the United health insurance executive shooting.

The shooter in that case also was very smart.

He carried a personal grievance, and was unknown to any of the people at United.

He also traveled cross country, and he also carried out a plan that he spent a lot of time working up.

He wasn't alone on that either.

The guy that shot students at Tufts and also killed the MIT professor. He too traveled a great distance, he also planned it out thoroughly, and then he actually executed his plan, and he too was very smart.

He was a guy that went to Tufts himself.

Do we see a pattern here?

And there's one more component that makes it even more difficult to prevent.

These guys do not have criminal records. 

They're able to purchase weapons legally.

They can pass any background check because they don't have criminal cases.

So they're not showing up on the radar beforehand.

All we have to do is look at these acts of workplace violence to realize that things are different.

And a large part of that is because our society is now grievance driven.

Yes, we have political violence, but that political violence is grievance driven.

As a matter of fact, when Marjorie Taylor Greene left Congress,

she talked about the threats to her own son, and how making them has become normalized.

Now, not everybody's in politics, but you don't have to be, because in the workplace, that translates to someone who has a grievance towards your business or your industry.

Remember, the healthcare executive shooting, the shooter, was not connected to that company.

He did have disagreements regarding healthcare, but he was not specifically involved with this entity. He did not have their insurance, or have to deal with their approval or denial of claims process.

So to address this different type of workplace violence, we have to actually take our workplace violence prevention playbook and throw it out the window.

We need to reconfigure and rework our plans so that we focus on keeping everyone safe in this type of environment and from these types of risks.

The fastest way to know if your workplace violence prevention plan is on the right track is to have a simple conversation with someone that does this work all of the time.

I'm offering a free 15 minute risk audit consultation.

There's absolutely no obligation.

All you have to do is click on the link, set up some time, and we'll go over where you're at in your plan.

I'll look at whether you're on track with your plan, or if not, what specific 3 areas for you to focus on you to improve your plan and make it compliant with California law.

And whether or not you choose to work with me, I want to make sure that you are going in the right direction.

So let's use the correspondence dinner as an example.

We now know that this person had a manifesto, and obviously a person who has a manifesto is carrying a grievance.

We know that he traveled from Torrance, California.

We know that he legally purchased his weapons.

And we know that he plotted this out to a point of getting his hotel room in the same hotel where this event was going to take place.

And we have to state the obvious. He was fully aware of all of the security.

The presidential security detail was there.The Secret Service was there.

The police were there, the FBI was there.

This place was packed with law enforcement, and with security.

Yet, he managed to burst right through the check in area and start shooting.

Thankfully, he didn't harm anyone.

His attack makes it clear that you cannot stop workplace violence by trying to control access to your workplace.

Yes, there are things that you can do to make it more difficult, but in the end, where there's a will, there's a way, and if this person wants to come in, they can do it.

So you need to start thinking about not "hardening the targets" as the supposed experts cite, but about making it more difficult, and doing so in a way that forces a person who wants to engage in violence, to reveal himself earlier.

That's what was missing here. Yes, they conducted simple background checks of the hotel guests, but they were not watching what was going on here.

They were busy doing their security check in.

They were busy doing their perimeter checks.

They were busy checking in with the president and his wife, checking in with the members of Congress and the administration that were there.

But they were not doing the one thing they really needed to do, which is to watch everyone and look for someone that is doing things a little differently. They should have noticed him, and talked with him before he was able to charge through the check-in area and get off several rounds.

That wasn't a security issue, though. It was a paying attention situation. Situational awareness is still the most powerful workplace violence prevention strategy to avoid physical harm that there is.

And by the way, for your workplace, don't think that security cameras can do that for you.

Cameras have to be monitored, otherwise cameras are only beneficial after the fact.

So what does that mean for your business?

Whether you're a medical business, a legal business, a manufacturing business, your human eyes and ears are what matters in this case. 

Perhaps it's the front desk people.

Perhaps it's in your shipping folks.

Someone from your organization needs to be paying attention to identify somebody or something that seems different.

And once they become aware of that, the next thing is you have to alert other people and let them know that there's a problem.

In the case of the correspondence dinner, somebody getting ready to run in is going to give a physical tell.

You tense up. Coil. Like a cobra getting ready to strike. 

That's what needed to be detected. That would have prevented the violence.

Now, I'm not blaming these folks here.

They have their work cut out for them, and I am really hopeful that President Trump finally learned a lesson about grievance driven violence that he's helped stoke. 

Now that same grievance driven workplace violence looks to have been directed against he and his cabinet officials.

So hopefully he will now try to get everybody to take a step back.

But we have to understand something. It's not just politics.

AI, which has a lot of great benefits, has also raised the fear of losing jobs.

That's why Sam Altman is now getting attacked at his home. People are fearful and blame him.

Grievance driven anger is being directed towards him because his product, AI, might actually upend people's lives.

And that's where grievance comes from.

It's not red versus blue.

It's not liberal versus conservative.

It's about the impact that comes from upending of someone's life.

I've previously written about how changing financial situations can upend someone's life, and that can drive someone into workplace violence.

Now, there's another problem with most people's workplace violence prevention approach that needs to be addressed here.

There was no de-escalation that could take place once he burst through security.

Yes, they're doing their checks, they're they're looking at people, they're inspecting bags, whatever they're doing, the typical type things.

But, he just burst right through.

That's how violence happens. No threats first. Just go.

Too many people think de-escalation is the only strategy to avoid physical harm that you need.

But, the reality is that most of the time there is no opportunity to de-escalate.

Most of the time these attackers are not telegraphing what they're going to do, and they're certainly not telegraphing it to the intended targets.

So we have to be able to understand that violence can occur, and it typically does occurs without warning, because when violence happens without warning, it's akin to a sneak attack.

The attacker is catching people off their guard. And that's their greatest advantage.

The same thing, if you look at the health insurance executive, He was on his way to the conference.

The attacker waited for him and stepped out from the shadows and just started firing as the executive walked past him.

He didn't call out to him. He didn't threaten him first, or even tell him what he didn't like about health insurance. Just pulled the trigger.

So we have to approach things differently.

When it comes to workplace violence prevention.

We need to comply with California law, but you also need for it to be effective so that you can protect your employees.

That's how you retain employees, employees who feel unprotected by their employers are not going to stick around.

They're not going to do their best work.

They're not even going to care.

That's not good for your bottom line.

So even if you have to come at this from a little bit of a self-interest in protecting the business that you built, protecting the organization that you built, in managing the government agency that that you manage, You need to have a vested interest in everybody else's safety because it affects, Your bottom line, it affects your effectiveness.

And we all want to be effective in our workplace or we should be doing something different.

What I want you to take away from this is I want you to throw out the traditional workplace violence, prevention, guidelines.

And I want you to think about things just from your employees specific things they do.

I want you to talk with your employees.

I want you to look at your physical surroundings.

I want you to assess those specific risks that your organization faces. Not some general well there are 4 source types of workplace violence.

And I want you to personalize this. To develop as much information as you can so that your employees can be as safe as possible.

So remember, the fastest way to get this done. Is to talk to someone who does this day in and day out, who's done this for over a decade, who's spent 30 years investigating violence and how it could have been prevented.

And go ahead and do your free 15 minute workplace violence risk audit.

Let's go through where you're at.

Let's look at what your strengths and your weaknesses are and what ways you can do to really nail this.