In this week’s episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser takes a look at how companies can prevent violence in the workplace. Using highlights from a recent article in Marketwatch about preventing workplace violence, Bryan talks through several steps that organizations can take to deter, prevent, and mitigate acts of violence in the workplace.

This is a topic we’ve touched on a number of times – including how to overcome hurdles in workplace violence prevention programs, determining the effectiveness of a workplace violence prevention program, and the top 5 reasons your company needs a workplace violence prevention program.

it’s important in any organization for workplace violence prevention to be an important part of the culture and security programs in the workplace. This episode uses recent examples of incidents to help drive that point home.

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. I’m Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath.

This week I want to talk about active shooter situations and violent incidents that occur in the workplace. Specifically, I want to highlight some recommendations from an article that was in Market Watch on May 28th of this year, because I thought that it included a really succinct and valuable set of recommendations. It really highlights how employers, managers, workers, and human resources professionals can help prevent violent incidents at work. I would add, because it leaves this out, the role of the security professional and the crisis management team in such things as well.

So, let’s take a look. They have 11 recommendations and I want to just talk through these briefly and highlight, you know, some of my own personal experiences with these. The first is a recommendation that companies have more than a zero tolerance policy. We heard a lot, 10 or 15 years ago, about having zero tolerance workplace violence policies. Zero tolerance weapons in schools policies. Zero tolerance violence policies. There’s certainly value in that, but workplace violence prevention shouldn’t be limited just to traditional zero tolerance policies around threats, fights, and sexual harassment.

These are still important, and I don’t want to diminish the importance of taking these kinds of incidents seriously, but we should also have policies and programs that educate employees on warning signs of leading folks to a workplace violence incidence. That can be changes in behavior and sudden withdraw, depression, disgruntlement, and none of these really fall under the traditional zero tolerance policies. We should have, maybe, described a zero tolerance based policies, but we need these other elements to be in a part of that.

The second recommendation is to create a relaxed, open, and transparent work culture. Really what they’re getting at here, in the article, is that hostile, fearful environments don’t help. You want a workplac