Violence against employees is one of the greatest security challenges facing modern organizations. Whether it involves violent patients in healthcare facilities, passengers on public transport, guests in tourist accommodation, or customers in retail stores — organizations must ensure that their employees are protected.
Employees are exposed to various forms of violence. The most common is psychological violence, which includes shouting, insults, verbal abuse, harassment, and even direct threats. Workplace bullying, or mobbing, can also be considered a form of psychological violence. Psychological violence carried out over the telephone, by e-mail, online, and through other communication channels constitutes a category of its own. A particularly problematic form is physical violence, which ranges from shoving, slapping, kicking, hitting, and biting to life-threatening attacks involving weapons.
Organizations have long been aware of the problem of violence and have accordingly adopted certain measures to prevent its occurrence and mitigate its consequences for employees. This typically includes drafting internal rules, conducting occasional training, and implementing selected technical security solutions. In most cases, however, these measures are disconnected from one another, overly generic, poorly implemented, and — for certain job positions, organizational units, or even entire organizations — pointless.
Preventing workplace violence requires a unified, systematic, and analytically supported approach that addresses all employees, organizational units, locations, and other stakeholders. In this way, individual measures complement one another and are optimized and tailored to the specific characteristics of each organization. This enables the organization to prevent violence more successfully while also responding to individual incidents more effectively.
How to establish an effective violence prevention program in an organization?
There is no universal approach to violence prevention. Just as organizations differ in their core activities, business locations, number of employees, and customer profiles, they also differ in their exposure to violence. Before establishing a comprehensive violence prevention program, it is therefore essential to conduct a baseline analysis. This analysis has two objectives: (1) to analyze the incidence of violence within the organization, and (2) to identify and evaluate the existing security measures with which the organization manages violence against employees. The organization thus gains comprehensive insight into the real risks it is most exposed to. Organizations often lack a realistic or complete picture of the incidence of violence against their employees and consequently adopt inadequate measures. The results of the analysis show the organization's management which violence-related risks the organization is exposed to and how effective the existing security measures are at reducing them. Of course, the analysis alone is not enough — reducing the risks it identifies requires concrete measures.
Violence prevention measures must optimally address the risks the organization is exposed to in this area. The aim should be a comprehensive violence prevention system, which means that individual measures must be interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The results of the analysis are our primary guide, but other factors must be considered as well. Measures must not interfere excessively with the organization's day-to-day processes or in any way harm relationships among employees. Although it is almost always the employees themselves who want the organization to adopt more violence prevention measures, excessive intrusion into daily activities can achieve precisely the opposite — employees simply stop observing the measures.
Which measures should an organization adopt?
Even though there is no universal approach to violence prevention, there are areas of action that are relevant to every organization. As part of a comprehensive violence prevention program, organizations must address the following areas:
- Providing adequate infrastructure. Organizations must provide infrastructure that ensures a safe working environment for employees. It is equally important not to overlook the infrastructural factors that contribute to the emergence of aggressive behavior (e.g. undersized waiting rooms, uncomfortable bus seating, poor ventilation, excessive noise, …).
- Providing a supportive environment along with rules, policies, protocols, and instructions for managing violence. Words on paper cannot eliminate violence against employees by themselves, but they can serve as the basis for adopting and implementing the necessary measures. A formal framework for recognizing, preventing, and dealing with violence must be established within the organization. Violence prevention measures must be clearly defined, as must the response protocols for cases where violence does occur. Responsibilities for handling incidents must be clearly assigned, and clear, transparent communication with employees and the public is just as important.
- Establishing an education program. Organizational security in all its forms always begins with employees. Although not every case of violence can be prevented, good communication and the proper handling of aggressive individuals can successfully de-escalate conflicts that might otherwise erupt into serious violence. Employees need to be taught how to respond appropriately to different forms of violence and given the information contained in the internal instructions and protocols for managing it. When preparing the education program, it is important not to generalize the training content across all employees, but to develop it based on the risk assessment of individual job positions — and to offer it to employees in a variety of formats that capture their attention.
- Optimizing physical and technical security measures. Appropriate physical and technical security systems can contribute significantly to the effective management of violence against employees. Within a violence prevention system, physical and technical security measures play both a preventive and a reactive role. Their presence deters potentially violent individuals from aggressive behavior, protects employees, and strengthens their sense of safety. If violence does break out, the presence of a physical security service makes intervention possible, while the video surveillance system records evidence for any subsequent proceedings. It is essential to bear in mind, however, that not all measures are suitable for all organizations — they must be introduced systematically, based on the actual level of risk.
Where to go from here?
Establishing a comprehensive violence prevention program is, of course, far too complex a process to describe in a single blog post. At IVSR – Institute for Security and Strategic Research, we strive to help you through it and make the process as smooth as possible — while raising the level of protection your employees enjoy against violence. To this end, we also enable organizations to obtain the certificate Certified Organizational Violence Prevention Program, with which, in addition to demonstrating compliance with security standards and good practices, you also show the outside world your commitment to providing a safe working environment.
You can read more about establishing a comprehensive violence prevention program at this link.
