Five Management Approaches to Workplace Violence Prevention

The best strategies for workplace violence prevention involve updated and enforced company policies; an awareness that real perpetrators don’t necessarily make direct threats to their targets; safe ways for concerned employees to report threats they hear; and the creation of Threat Assessment Teams to manage situations successfully. These five related

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management interventions can help those efforts as well.

Administrative Management

Humane supervision and treatment. Much research into the motives for employee violence suggests that many perpetrators targeted certain bosses or HR representatives because they felt mistreated by them. How we treat employees, especially at the most stressful times in their careers, can make a huge difference in preventing future threats or violence.

Coaching meetings. While coaching is not an appropriate choice for an individual who is actively threatening, it may help to redirect performance or behavior problems or in the aftermath of a low-level behavioral outburst.

Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs). If there are no consequences for a behavior or performance issue, at worst it will escalate, and at best it won’t stop. These plans must be monitored and enforced.

Creative HR solutions. Employees with personal or professional stress may lash out at work. The HR department can use reasonable accommodation, paid or unpaid time off, sabbaticals, outside coaching specialists, or referrals to clinicians beyond the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider.

Benevolent severance. Many workplace violence perpetrators are driven by economic stress, mental illness, revenge, and a triggering event. We can lessen the impact of each of these by using severance pay, continued medical or EAP coverage, outplacement help, and an agreed-upon response for reference check calls from other employers.

Security Management

Access-control improvements. We know employees often trade security for convenience, leaving doors unlocked, allowing unbadged tailgaters to follow them, or failing to challenge trespassers. The best security devices should not be defeated by human error or carelessness.

The presence of well-trained security officers. Increasing the site’s security staffing levels with armed or unarmed officers can help deter outsiders and offer force protection prior to the arrival of police.

Cyber access control and monitoring. It’s important to review all cyber correspondence from threateners for escalation, repetition, and rising seriousness. Company IT can reroute threatening or disruptive e-mails aimed at certain employees and monitor them.

Increased law enforcement involvement. Asking police for extra patrols can help, especially if they are random and regular, so that subjects who may be surveilling the premises can’t predict if or when the cops will drive by.

“Active Shooter” plans. These “Run-Hide-Fight” plans should remind employees that they have a stake in protecting themselves at work, including evacuating, calling 911 from safety, securing themselves in a safe room, and fighting back instead of capitulating.

Information Management

Work-history file review by HR. Looking at the employee’s work behavior and performance over his or her tenure with the organization can reveal patterns of conflict, misconduct, or failed, stressful, or contentious relationships.

Forensic statement analyses. Threat assessment professionals can offer insights into what subjects are saying to others or writing in emails or social media postings, about escalation, targeting, loss of hope, anger, manic-depression, and suicidal or homicidal ideations.

Review of social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, blogs and other open-source sites can offer security, HR, and IT representatives information about a troubled worker’s ideas, plans, motives, and triggers.

Input from concerned co-workers. Many workplace violence plots were thwarted when co-workers had the courage to come forward and notify supervisors, security, and law enforcement about threats they heard from a high-risk employee.

Mental Health Management

Assessing suicidal versus homicidal behaviors. Is the at-risk employee talking or writing about depression, anxiety, rage, or frustration? Do we see signs in conversations, phone calls, messages, e-mails, texts, or social media postings about suicidal or homicidal ideations?

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EAP referrals. As part of humane coaching, discipline, and even terminations, it can help to fully explain this resource to the disturbed employee and try to remove the stigma of getting qualified clinical help.

Fitness for Duty (FFD) evaluations. A FFD evaluation by a licensed clinician can determine if a problematic employee can return to full work and what work restrictions or accommodations must be made.

Return-to-work strategies. If the organization decides to allow an employee who made threats to return to work, it must have a transition plan. Employees can be fearful of a returning employee who has made workplace violence or gun-related threats.

Freedom Management

Civil TRO or stay-away orders. Restraining orders work best for so-called “rule followers” and what we know about many workplace violence perpetrators is that they cannot follow the rules, which is often why they created so many problems on the job. Civil stay-away orders or Emergency Protective Orders (EPOs) are not bulletproof shields, but they do help the police enforce consequences for those terminated employees who keep coming back to argue, threaten, or trespass.

Police arrest. When the police arrive at a work site, the message is clear: they are there to either lower the emotional temperature, enforce consequences, or both. They can detain mentally ill subjects for a mental health evaluation; warn or cite trespassing former employees; and arrest threatening, violent, or armed perpetrators before they attack.

Police detention to a mental health facility. Some workplace violence subjects are a danger to themselves, a danger to others, and/or gravely disabled. Any of these alone or in combination can allow the police to take the threatener to a clinic or hospital for an evaluation.

Short or long-term mental health holds. The value of a legal, ethical, and humane mental health hold is that it gets the threatener into a treatment setting, where the clinicians can do their work to understand, assess, and stabilize him or her.

Prosecution, probation, parole. The courts can put geographic restrictions on a workplace threatener, extend restraining orders from temporary to permanent, and give this person the post-incarceration release structure they need and their former employer may demand.

Which of these approaches works best? As a good workplace violence consultant and threat assessment specialist, I always say the same thing, “It depends.” The reality of workplace violence prevention is that we don’t always know what drives a subject off the path from ideas to actions. We prove success through the absence of the problem.

Dr. Steve Albrecht is a keynote speaker, author, podcaster, and trainer. He focuses on high-risk employee issues, threat assessments, and school and workplace violence prevention. In 1994, he co-wrote Ticking Bombs, one of the first business books on workplace violence. He holds a doctorate in Business Administration (DBA); an M.A. in Security Management; a B.S. in Psychology; and a B.A. in English. He is board certified in HR, security, coaching, and threat management. He worked for the San Diego Police Department for 15 years and has written 17 books on business, HR, and criminal justice subjects. He can be reached at DrSteve@DrSteveAlbrecht.com or on Twitter @DrSteveAlbrecht