Workers Gone Wild – Strategies for Handling Workplace Violence and Other Threats
During a breakout session at the 2013 America's Safest Companies Conference, experts urged employers to develop policies and procedures that address workplace violence, terrorist attacks and catastrophic accidents – and sticking to them. Conflict is a fact of life in any workplace. Most of us learn to work through it, peacefully and constructively. But when you factor an unstable personality into the equation, it can be a recipe for dangerous behavior. Of the 4,383 workers who died on the job last year, 767 were the victims of workplace violence, according to preliminary 2012 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number includes 463 homicides and 225 suicides. "When we talk about policies and procedures, these are the rules," said Steve Davis, president and CEO of the risk-management consulting firm GRM Inc. "They must be published. They must be trained. And they must be uniformly applied. If you miss one of those three, you're going to cause yourself a problem." Davis also emphasized the importance of developing contingency plans that address how a company will recover after a catastrophic event such as a workplace shooting. Davis advised employers to meet with their local medical and hospital personnel to coordinate their respective emergency response plans and to drill their plans, evaluate the results, make any necessary adjustments – and drill them some more.
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Report: Mass Notification Moving Beyond SMS Communications
According to a new report from IHS, providers of m ass notification systems software are beginning to embrace to new methods for delivering alerts beyond text messages. Traditionally, IHS said that MNS software has used short message service (SMS) as the sole means for sending out warnings to recipients. However, SMS can be compromised during large- scale emergencies and MNS vendors are now looking into how they can push notification and apps to smartphones, which have become more ubiquitous in recent years. Since 2009, MNS push notifications have been m ade available through smartphone apps that provide users with the ability to message over Wi-Fi, eliminating the need for traditional phone networks to be operative. While push notifications have a clear benefit, the effectiveness of this approach depends upon the level of adoption of smartphones by end users. However, this is becoming less of an issue with an increasing number of people moving to smartphones. At the same time, push notifications would be supplementary to the existing SMS system that is in place with full replacement unlikely to occur. ―Multimodal systems that use various means of communication to end users are becoming a necessity
to ensure that individuals are kept well-informed during emergency situations,‖ said Omar Talpur, security, fire and access control analyst at IHS. ―To keep up with the market, suppliers who have focused solely on SMS communications will need to invest in other technologies, or run the risk of being left behind in a very lucrative market.‖
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Meeting the Subject of a Threat Assessment: is it Always Necessary?
When assessing a threat in the workplace, it isn't always necessary to meet with the subject in question, says Dr. Steve Albrecht. All successful threat assessments require both information and conversation. W e m ust k now as m uch as p ossible about the subject making the threat and his or her intended targets. And we must be able to communicate with as many people as we can (with confidentiality in mind, of course) to ask questions, get answers, and develop our potential solutions. Threat assessment is a team approach in every respect, because the decisions either come from or affect so many stakeholders. Albrecht says the decision to meet with the subject or not depends. Will the meeting with that person help or hurt? Will it make it more or less likely the person will act out? Does it make it better or worse for the organization and any current or potential victims? Albrecht says if we can get data from a wide variety of sources, it may not be necessary to meet with them to draw our conclusions and come up with a plan. Threat assessment is not about "predicting violence," it's about assessing dangerousness. Therefore, it is important to use the four pillars of security management success: information, intuition, experience, and our ability to communicate, either with the subject and/or the people who will have to make decisions about the subject.
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Conflicting Active Shooter Training Concepts Cause Confusion
Over several decades, various methods across the nation have been used to teach the public defensive and offensive reactions to an active shooter scenario at college campuses and in the workplace. Today, the public and law enforcement are expected to react quickly as a part of a standard active shooter response plan. Police officers are now trained to actively engage an active shooter where they find them. The public expects competent, effective, consistent and standardized training of first responders and active shooter training. It is essential to reduce confusion and
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