Starting anything new can be a struggle, as can revamping or adding to existing programs. Often an organization will experience a violent event that can cost them both monetarily and have serious reputational impacts. Even worse, a violent event can lead to loss of a beloved co-worker and family member with long-lasting impact on the organization.
Sometimes it’s not a violent event that directly impacts the organization but one that happens elsewhere that leads us to accept that we can no longer have the “it’s not going to happen here,” mentality.
We often get asked, “how or where do I start?”, “what do I need to get started?” “what is the best way to approach this?” I have learned over the years through benchmarking with many organizations that there are many ways of managing and running a workplace violence prevention program – it’s never a one-size fits all solution.
Here are a few tips that can help to get you started:
The Workplace Violence & Threat Management Policy
Always start with a well-thought out corporate policy that will serve as the beginning of your new program. A good policy should provide clear guidance to employees, contractors, and students (if applicable) and clearly define the expectations of your organization for workplace violence prevention conduct. A good policy will also provide guidance to supervisors on how to respond and report threats of workplace violence.
A workplace violence prevention policy should always clearly define specifically who the policy covers. It should include all employees, contractors, and/or students depending on the structure and purpose of your organization.
I recommend a zero-tolerance policy that sets the expectation for all to understand that every incident of workplace violence or threat of workplace violence will be taken seriously and investigated but will not necessarily be treated the same.
A well-written policy should always include where and how to report threats and incidents of workplace violence. It should also include direction for what supervisors or HR should do with the information that has been reported to them. The policy should also clearly explain how the policy will be enforced.
Reporting Structure
Once you have a solid policy created and approved by all of the appropriate stakeholders, you will need to establish a way for employees and managers to escalate incidents and threats.
In other words, a student on campus gets threatened by another student. What means do you have for the victim to report this incident? If a reporting structure is not already in place for your organization, you will need to create one aligned against the expectations in your new policy.
There should be multiple means to report incidents or threats. Those means should be widely communicated to employees at all levels. Employees should be able to talk to their supervisors but for whatever reason, if they do not believe they can, there should be a hotline to call or another appropriate reporting mechanism.
An independent body within your organization, such as Security or Human Resources should be charged with the responsibility to follow-up and collect these reports as well.
As you design this process, you should be asking yourself the following question: “If an incident occurred or if a threat was made, how is this information getting funneled to the appropriate people?
Does everyone know and understand how to do that?”
Take a Team Approach
Threats of workplace violence are often complicated situations with many moving parts. In my experience, even seemingly simple situations can escalate quickly and are often underestimated. Ideally there should never be just one person responsible for making decisions and thinking through appropriate courses of action on their own.
I always recommend a team approach with evaluating threats and making plans to mitigate or manage an incident. This approach should be multi-disciplinary and should include experts such as human resources, internal or external counsel, trained workplace violence prevention experts, security professionals, and outside experts where appropriate.
With serious cases or unique situations, utilizing certain outside experts may be a prudent course of action. Experts such as an operational psychologist, a suicide prevention expert, or a domestic violence expert can bring much needed expertise and experience to a situation.
No one situation is like any other, so having a multi-disciplinary team will provide a holistic approach, including multiple unique perspectives as your team develops your plan of action
This approach can also reduce the liability for your organization by ensuring that steps are taken to protect your team, your organization’s reputation, and others by preventing violent events from occurring.
Where to Go From Here
Policy, reporting, and a team are the foundation. From there, a program grows into trained threat assessment, consistent case management, data-driven reporting, and a clear link to your crisis management team for the cases that escalate.
Two outside references are worth knowing. The ASIS Workplace Violence and Active Assailant: Prevention, Intervention, and Response Standard (ASIS WVPI AA-2020) is the main US standard for this work, and our ASIS Workplace Violence and Active Assailant Maturity Model lets you score your program against it. And if you have employees in California, SB 553 has required most employers there to keep a written workplace violence prevention plan, train employees, and maintain a violent incident log since July 1, 2024.
To see what a mature program looks like, read how our team helped a large retailer in building and maturing a workplace violence prevention program, or listen to Episode 192 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast on the basics of a workplace violence prevention and threat management program.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
- Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and security writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
- Measure your program. Our ASIS Workplace Violence and Active Assailant Maturity Model scores your program in five stages, from ad hoc to optimized.
- Practice the hard case. Exercise in a Day® builds a full custom tabletop in one business day, including active assailant and threat scenarios.
- Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your workplace violence prevention program with us.
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