Your Workplace Violence Prevention Plan Only Works If You Do These 4 Things

Did you know there are 4 things that give away whether you used a boilerplate, workplace violence prevention plan or where you really did the work?

And as a result of doing the work, made your employees and your organization safer.

I'm going to take you through the four things that are tells as to whether you really want to make a safer workplace, or you're just looking to have something in writing.

I spent 30 years investigating violence at workplaces, whether for civil plaintiff attorneys where we sued, usually on behalf of 3rd parties, but sometimes on behalf of employees, looking to get past workers compensation.

And when I conducted internal investigations for employers into violence incidents at their workplace.

Here's the four things that are dead giveaway, that you chose to go the boilerplate route, and not do the actual work that's required to make your employees and your workplace safer.

Number 1: Safety Hazard Assessment

Now, the easy way is to just say, we serve the public, so therefore our employees are at safety risk from the public.

That's really not how you do it, and that's not an effective way to do it.

The way you want to do it is you want to look at a few different things:

• You want to look at how your employees work
• Who they work with
• Who accesses your workplace
• Look at the physical environment of your workplace.

You want to look at lighting. You want to look at ingress, egress, all of those different types of things will tell you what the actual safety hazards, your employees face, and that's absolutely critical, because in order to address those safety hazards, you need to know where the real risks are, and it's that process of addressing those safety hazards that will actually make your employees safer.

Number 2: Whether you actively involve your employees in the workplace violence prevention process

Under California law, actively involving your employees in the entire prevention plan process is an absolute necessity.

But what does that mean?

Does that mean that you can create something and then just have everybody sign off on it?

No.

They need to be involved in this from the ground up with their input, and the reason for that is they're the ones that face the safety risks that come from workplace violence.

And in particular, Most employers really don't know the ins and the outs of the work that each employee does.

So involving the employees gives you that ability to determine all of the safety hazards.

It also helps you to determine what types of trainings you should provide to your employees.

Look, there's a lot of people that sell trainings to employers that you really don't need.

Trainings like "run, hide, and fight" active shooter training.

But active shooters involve less than one percent of all workplace violence incidents.

Doing that training that might make you feel good, though your employees will tell you, it scared the crap out of them.

But it's not addressing the real safety risks they face, which are comprised by the other 99% of incidents.

So by actively engaging your employees, they will tell you what types of trainings they think are most helpful, and they're going to tell you how to remedy the safety hazards that they are facing so that you have a real good read on that.

Number 3: Training in strategies to avoid physical harm

Now, California requires this, and they're silent as to what that means, and that's the right thing to do, because you need to tailor the trainings and strategies to avoid physical harm to the types of safety hazards your employees face.

The absolute best way to do that is to work with your employees, and to look at the processes they use to do their work

It's to look at the people they interact with.

All of those things come to play.

To me, the single most important training that you can provide is not de-escalation training.

Yes, that's important. But understand that most violence occurs without warning.

There is no chance to de-escalate.

So by making that your primary strategy, you're putting your employees at a disadvantage.

It's far better for their safety to train them in situational awareness. How to read the environment they're in, and the people within it, so that they can recognize a safety hazard BEFORE it becomes a genuine threat to their safety and before they actually have to engage with an attacker.

There are different strategies to avoid physical harm that match your employees specific safety hazards.

For example, if you have employees that come and go in darkness, then you need to think about low light training for your employees, how to do that safely.

Including in that training would be parking lot safety.

You need to look at your overall light conditions and look at ways that you can train your employees to make sure they can come and go, make sure they can open or close in safety.

've worked on quite a few incidents where someone's been attacked in low light situations.

So understanding what your employees do, how they do the work, when they do the work, where they do the work, is how you come up with the proper strategies.

Same with employees that work at other peoples' locations.

 Let's say you have social workers or RNs or elder care workers who go to people's homes.

 You're not seeing the homes yourself, so you need to find out from your employees what it's like to work in these homes so that you can help them learn the correct strategies to avoid physical harm for their work situation:

• You can teach them not to be trapped by the people they work with
• You can teach them how to assess who else is in the house
• You can teach them how to communicate to let you know if there's a real safety concern so that you can guide them on what to do.

 All of these will help keep your employees safer. And none of them are boilerplate.

If you go with generic run, hide, and fight, or de-escalation trainings, and you're employees are not dealing with those types of situations you're putting your employees at risk by not training them in the proper strategies.

Number 4: Effective Investigations

And the last element that's also a dead giveaway as to whether you're trying to implement a plan that keeps your employees and your organization safer especially from workplace violence that involves your own employees is the effectiveness of the investigations you conduct:

• Are your employees trained to know where to go to bring a complaint?
• How to file a complaint?
• Who to speak with?
• Are your employees that handle the investigations trained in how to conduct them effectively?
• Do they know who to interview first?
• Do they know what information to cover?
• Do they know how to conduct witness interviews?
• How to location different types of documentation they might need?

If not, here's why that's an absolute dead giveaway to a boilerplate workplace violence prevention plan that won't make your employees and your workplace safer.

 Coworker violence is the easiest workplace violence to prevent, and the single best way to do that is to take effective investigative action once you learn of an incident or near incident.

And to conduct a proper investigation that uncovers what happened so that you can make smart decisions about what to do in terms of discipline, about what to do to make changes internally so that those types of situations don't occur again.

And conducting effective investigations guides you through the process of creating a workplace violence incident log. The information you develop is the same information that goes into the log.

 And it will also dictate to you what processes you should implement so that you can reduce that risk for coworker violence.

If you're not sure where you are on these 4 things and whether your workplace violence prevention plan actually addresses these in a way that will make your employees safer that will protect your organization financially, Why not set up a call with me?

Just click on the link to schedule your call, and together we'll go through where you're at with these 4 different processes.

And I'll point you in the right direction of what you need to do to make sure that you're covered.