Facility Safety Management

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Four Broad Categories
Strategies for Workplace Violence Prevention

As workplace violence continues to garner more and more attention, occupational safety specialists and other analysts have broadly agreed that responding to workplace violence requires attention to more than just an actual physical attack.

Homicide and other physical assaults are on a continuum that also include domestic violence, stalking, threats, harassment, bullying, emotional abuse, intimidation, and other forms of conduct that create anxiety, fear and a climate of distrust in the workplace.

All are part of the workplace violence problem. Prevention programs that do not consider harassment in all forms and threats are unlikely to be effective.

While agreeing on that broader definition of the problem, specialists have also come to a consensus that workplace violence falls into the following four broad categories:

TYPE 1: Violent acts by criminals who have no other connection with the workplace, but enter to commit robbery or another crime.

TYPE 2: Violence directed at employees by customers, clients, patients, students, inmates, or any others for whom an organization provides services.

TYPE 3: Violence against coworkers, supervisors, or managers by a present or former employee.

TYPE 4: Violence committed in the workplace by someone who doesn’t work there, but has a personal relationship with an employee—an abusive spouse or domestic partner.

Type 1 violence by criminals otherwise unconnected to the workplace accounts for the vast majority—nearly 80 percent— of workplace homicides. In these incidents, the motive is usually theft, and in a great many cases, the criminal is carrying a gun or other weapon, increasing the likelihood that the victim will be killed or seriously wounded.

This type of violence falls heavily on particular occupational groups whose jobs make them vulnerable, such as taxi drivers (the job that carries by far the highest risk of being murdered), late-night retail or gas station clerks, and others who are on duty at night, who work in isolated locations or dangerous neighborhoods, and who carry or have access to cash.

Preventive strategies for Type 1 include an emphasis on physical security measures, special employer policies, and employee training. In fact, it is suggested that one of the reasons for the decline in workplace homicides since the early 1990s is due to the security measures put in place by businesses that may be vulnerable to this type of activity.

Because the outside criminal has no other contact with the workplace the interpersonal aspects of violence prevention that apply to the other three categories are normally not relevant to Type 1 incidents.

The response after a crime has occurred will involve conventional law enforcement procedures for investigating, finding and arresting the suspect, and collecting evidence for prosecution.

Type 2 cases typically involve assaults on an employee by a customer, patient, or someone else receiving a service. In general, the violent acts occur as workers are performing their normal tasks. In some occupations, dealing with dangerous people is inherent in the job, as in the case of a police officer, correctional officer, security guard, or mental health worker. For other occupations, violent reactions by a customer or client are unpredictable, triggered by an argument, anger at the quality of service or denial of service, delays, or some other precipitating event.

Employees experiencing the largest number of Type 2 assaults are those in healthcare occupations—nurses in particular, as well as doctors, nurses and aides who deal with psychiatric patients; members of emergency medical response teams; and hospital employees working in admissions, emergency rooms, and crisis or acute care units.

Type 3 and 4 violence involves past or present employees and acts committed by domestic abusers or arising from other personal relationships that follow an employee into the workplace. When the violence comes from an employee or someone close to an employee, there is a much greater chance that some warning sign will have reached the employer in the form of observable behavior. That knowledge, along with the appropriate prevention programs, can at the very least mitigate the potential for violence or prevent it altogether.

Clearly, violence in the workplace affects society as a whole. The economic cost, difficult to measure with any precision, is certainly substantial. There are intangible costs too.

Like all violent crime, workplace violence creates ripples that go beyond what is done to a particular victim. It damages trust, community, and the sense of security every worker has a right to feel while on the job. In that sense, everyone loses when a violent act takes place, and everyone has a stake in efforts to stop violence from happening.

Employers have a legal and ethical obligation to promote a work environment free from threats and violence and, in addition, can face economic loss as the result of violence in the form of lost work time, damaged employee morale and productivity, increased workers’ compensation payments, medical expenses, and possible lawsuits and liability costs.

An employers’ important roles in violence prevention should include adopting a workplace violence policy and prevention program and communicating the policy and program to employees. FSM

Source: National Institute for Prevention of Workplace Violence.