5 Steps for Successful Lockdown Procedures – continued from page 4
established and regularly practiced. When it comes to securing a school or building, there is not a ―one size fits all‖ solution. The age of the facility, credential management platform and inherent protocols, budget and long-term security strategy must be considered. National standards for school lockdown procedures are beginning to emerge. However, the responsibility of developing a lockdown policy continues to lie with individual facility administrators and security personnel. By design, an emergency lockdown procedure ensures that all internal and external doors and windows are locked or secured. Occupants inside the building(s) remain inside their secured rooms and await an ―all clear‖ from emergency personnel.
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Local Experts Say Workplace Violence Remains 'Extremely Rare'
It's impossible to say there's a trend of increasing gun violence across the nation, according to sociologist Clay Mosher, who analyzes crime trends and teaches criminology at Washington State University Vancouver. "This could be just a blip," he said, after two workplace shootings and one drug-related shooting in two days left three people dead and three injured. "You could see this many things in this many days," Mosher said. "Then you could see nothing for quite some time." But it's absolutely possible to say that we as a society are growing accustomed to hearing about random gun violence breaking out anywhere and everywhere. "We have become desensitized," Mosher said. That has mostly to do with the media universe we live in, he said. "I definitely think the media attention is
greater...It's a catch-22, because the media has to cover it, of course.‖ The fact is, violent crime in America has done nothing but shrink for years, he said. "Most people are surprised to learn that violent crime is dropping sharply and steadily," said Mosher's colleague Tom Tripp. Tripp, a business professor who specializes in workplace psychology and conflict, added that violence and "violent revenge" in the workplace are "extremely rare." According to the latest BLS figures, there were 767 workplace deaths in the U.S. due to violence or suicide in 2012. ―These are "astonishingly low numbers," Tripp said. "There are something like 140 million workers in the United States."
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Under Pressure Incidents of organizations getting egg on their face or being confronted with serious scandals are
commonplace. And especially in an era of 24-hour news, social media and greater transparency into corporations, managing crises today is forcing companies to pay more attention to the way they handle employee communications even as they work to shape external public relations. Employees upset by their employer‘s behavior may take to Twitter or Facebook to sound off. Alternatively, workers can rally in support of embattled bosses. Benefiting from, rather than being buffeted by, the internal workforce‘s response requires regular, honest communication to employees during troubled times, said Anne Grinols, an assistant dean at Baylor University‘s Hankamer School of Business. Grinols also said executives ought not to wait for a crisis to build up trust and goodwill among their workers. ―Credibility fuels communication,‖ she said. ―If you don‘t have credibility, you can talk all you want and nobody believes you.‖ To win over workers amid scandal, it is important to admit any problems and then lay out a plan to fix what‘s broken, said Steve Roop, general manager of talent solutions at Glassdoor. ―The biggest thing is don‘t put your head in the sand,‖ he said. Another key is to give workers affected by big news advance notice. Heightened transparency means professionals in human resources and public relations must be on their toes, Roop said. ―It puts a lot more stress on PR and HR to do this stuff right.‖
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SCHOOL VIOLENCE Experts: Arming Teachers Not the Answer to Stopping Active Shooters
Since the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook, it seems there has been a rash of legislative efforts across the country to legalize or, at least, provide the option for school districts to allow armed employees on their campuses. While most everyone would like to have an armed school resource officer on their campus, the fact remains that many school districts simply do not have the financial resources to do so. It would seem logical then that the next best thing would be to allow a limited number of trained staff members to carry firearms with them on school property, but experts say that just isn‘t true. Paul Timm, president of school security consulting firm RETA Security, believes that schools need to concentrate their efforts on bolstering access control measures and communications capabilities instead of arming staff members. Although most of the legislative proposals being pushed by state politicians call for teachers or administrators having to go through some type of training or certification process, school security consultant Patrick Fiel says it just doesn‘t measure up to the continual training that law enforcement goes through to carry a firearm.
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