Workplace Violence: Nature of the Problem

By: Mark Braverman and Susan Braverman

The front page carries the story: a desperate, perhaps deranged employee, enraged and desperate at having been fired or passed over for a promotion, returns to the workplace to exact his revenge. He may head straight for the VP's office, to confront him with a revolver and a single, well placed bullet. Or he may roam the halls with a deadly spray of automatic weapon fire, eliminating a number of individuals on his list of those who slighted him, interfered with his chances, or otherwise participated inhis humiliation, He saves a bullet for himself, leaving behind him grieving families and a workplace traumatized, terrified, and forever changed.

Crime, harassment, and internal violence has created a strikingly visible safety and health problem for the workplace. Recent figures from NIOSH and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that people at work are increasingly exposed to lethal violence. Homicide accounts for 17% of all deaths in the workplace. It was the leading cause of death for women in the workplace in ..... These figures, now well publicized, create a perception that the workplace is not safe. The picture of the angry worker bent onrevenge has become the symbol for the sense of betrayal and loss felt by the American worker in the face of the sweeping changes affecting all levels of the workforce. We must now add to this the frightening picture of gas station attendants, store clerks, and taxi drivers who are dying at work in unacceptably high numbers.

Violence has indeed arrived at the American workplace. But the scenarios of revenge and mass killings that grab national and local headlines are only a small part of what the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recently called an"epidemic" affecting the American workforce. The majority of incidents of workplace violence are not fatal assaults, but everyday occurences of physical violence, verbal threats, and forms of harassment. In a recent survey conducted by the Northwest National Life Insurance Company, 25% of American workers surveyed said that someone in their workplace had been assaulted, threatened with violence, or harrassed in the past year. This amounts to an estimated 2.2 million employees who have been directly affected by violence at work. Together with a mounting body of evidence, these figures summon the American workplace, to echo the words of US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, to recognize violence as a primary safety and health issue. The challenge is not only how to protect people from violence, it is how to protect them from the damage to morale and health and productivity that the fear of violence produces. You do not have to be physically attacked to be a victim.

These incidents affect American workers everyday. They happen when a violent ex-spouse ambushes the woman he has been stalking as she arrives for work. They happen when a government clerk, bank teller or retail worker is robbed at gunpoint, or when adesperate fellow worker, unsettled by growing economic despair, intimidates or threatens fellow workers, supervisors, or companies heads. These daily events are exacting an enormous toll in lost productivity through emotional suffering, stress-relatedillnesses, and rapid turnover.

This is a "bad news/good news" situation: The bad news is that American companies cannot stop the waves of violence from the society at-large from crashing through their office, boardroom and factory walls. Economic hardship, family and societal breakdown, and the problems of cities all enter the workplace with the thunk of the timecard and the ink of the employment contract. Downsizing and restructuring also heighten the risk of violence as an increasingly large number of people experience the humiliation, rage and fear associated with job loss. But there is good news as well: with the possible exception of the schools, there is no institution more able to make a difference in the security and qualityof life of its members than the workplace. There are significant steps that companies can take toward making their workplaces feel safer and more secure for their workers.

Costs of workplace violence.

The public and private costs of this problem need to be seen on both individual and system levels. For individuals, the effects of traumatic stress on victims of and witnesses to violence have been well established. Victims of violence suffer from a range of trauma-related illnesses that can cause temporary disability. When mishandled, these disabilities can become permanent, destroying the worker's health, ability to work, and, ultimately, the relationship with the employer. Witnesses and coworkers no longer feel safe at work, and lose confidence in the employer's ability or willingness to protect them. These other victims are less productive, more injury and illness-prone, and may have reduced longevity in the workplace. But employees who are upset,scared and demoralized by threats and acts of violence are not the only victims -- we must consider the perpetrator as well. Violent or threatening employees are, almost without exception, people with psychosocial risk factors who have broken down under stress. Whether the stress arises from conditions at work or are unrelated to the job, there are always warning signs that appear at work. This is why, whether the violence comes from within or without, responsibility for prevention rests with the workplace.

On the systems level, violence affects the climate and functioning of the workplace, often over a wide impact area. Managers are particularly demoralized and handicapped by the disruption and trauma of workplace violence. Unprepared and untrained to deal with critical events of this kind, managers are caught between their feelings of caring and responsibility for employees on the one hand and the pressure for productivity on the other: "What's the right thing to do?" "Do I have the time, expertise,or rght to try to help this person?" "Can I slow or stop production while we deal with the effect of this disaster?" Management's inability to deal with traumatic crises is costly, both in terms of individual health and productivity, and in general economic terms. When management is disabled, workplace mission founders, and productivity as well as worker health suffers. When a company does not deal successfully with these crises, it becomes prone to further crises that manifest in increasing health and productivity costs.

Conditions allowing workplace violence.

In the NWNL survey, xx% reported they had been harrassed or assaulted by a fellow employee. There is no single factor that increases the general climate or frequency of violence in a workplace. For violence and other traumatic crises to strike, a setof conditions must be present. These include:

1. Individual characteristics, e.g. paranoid personality and thinking style, drug or alcohol problem, life stressor (e.g. divorce/separation, illness), helplessness, isolation.
2. Precipitating events or conditions, e.g. termination, job change, harassment by superiors or fellow employees.
3. System characteristics. At-risk organizations ignore early warning signals, and are purely reactive. Such organizations tend to deny or ignore human issues, e.g. individual differences and needs of individual employees. They manage unusualsituations such as downsizings, terminations, and accidents poorly. They tend to punish or expel impaired, deviant employees and to get into adversarial relationships with such people, who in most cases are crying out for help. Communication between pivotal managers and departments is bad or non-existent. Information that could signal problems is not shared. Top management "delegates down" responsibility for these issues.

The Limits of Current Approaches to Workplace Violence

Not only can systems themselves contribute to the risk of violence, as outlined above. The risk and frequency of violence also depends on how well the system is able to respond to the individual and situational problems in the above list. To begin tofind solutions, therefore, we must look to the workplace itself. Much of the recent work on workplace violence has not looked in this direction, however. Instead, attention has focussed on three areas: (1) hiring and firing policies; (2) security strategies and work design for high-risk occupations; and (3) constructing a "profile" of the potentially violent worker. These approaches focus on the individual and his or her response to stresses of a layoff or termination, increased job demands, or non-work related stressors. Although these are important issues and deserve attention, they bypass the crucial system dimension. We have seen little work that bears directly on company human resource practices, health care, safety and injury policy, management style, or company-wide work culture issues. Any individual focus, whether from a law enforcement or an occupational health perspective, is limited and will fail to solve this problem, because it ignores the context that allows the violence to occur or violent climate to exist.

Most companies also have a "disaster" or "crisis" plan as part of their safety policies. Although some companies have added provisions for post-trauma counseling for employees after a disaster, few, if any, have approached prevention of violence or other man-made disasters as part of a crisis plan.

Dysfunctional responses to crisis

Cases of employee violence or threat provide excellent examples of how employers can miss opportunities to prevent or mitigate threats to employee security. Episodes of internal violence, threat, and harassment always involve individuals who are impaired or who are responding in a dysfunctional way to problematic conditions. In the typical scenario, employees who are struggling with their stress or showing early signs of disturbance or breakdown are ignored or overlooked by supervisors or managers who lack the skills or support systems to deal with the problem at an early stage. Ultimately, the problematic employee will encounter discipline, termination, or an adversarial injury compensation system as his breakdown manifests in more severe performance, behavioral, or health issues. Once these systems are engaged, crisis-relevant information gathering and collaborative decision making are thwarted. The nature of the problem is not discovered: Is an employee a "time bomb," requiring immediate care orcontainment? Is there a serious crisis in morale or working conditions on a work unit? Is a particular manager or company management policy in urgent need of correction? Is an employee resorting to disruptive behavior or substandard performance because an undiagnosed medical, occupational or behavioral impairment? Businesses can no longer rely on existing human resource policies, or even on "disaster response plans" to prevent or contain these events. In the absence of thoughtful planning, leadership participation, and collaboration between important players, needless suffering and tragedy can result. There is an urgent need for new structures and policies that embody an enlightened, prevention-oriented approach to violence.

Solutions

We must begin by expanding our notion of prevention. In a prevention-based, collaborative approach, the problem is framed in terms of the total workplace environment. Educating people, increasing collaboration between parties, and lowering the risk ofdisputes changes the way people perceive the threat of violence and the degree of helplessness that they feel in relation to the problem. It is important to understand the difference between proactive and reactive approaches to hazards. Adopting a proactive approach changes and expands the range of interventions available. Measurescan be taken to shield employees from a range of hazards related to violence as well as to mitigate its effects in terms of stress. This will involve looking at several classes of hazards:

• Environmental and situational exposures such as crime levels, contact with the public, handling money, etc.
• Workplace conditions, such as labor-management climate, management practices, occupational stressors such as time pressures, competition, layoffs or restructuring, and poor communication patterns.
• Health and rehabilitation conditions, e.g., availability and quality of health services and health promotion programs, EAP or other counseling services, nature of injury management and compensation policies (e.g. progressive and employer-involved, or punitive and adversarial?).

We should approach the issue of violence not in terms of categories of threat (e.g. crime, employee to employee threat, harassment) but in terms of the overall effect on the health and productivity of workers exposed to these threats. You do not need to be attacked to be the victim of violence. Depending on the particular needs of the employer, the solutions might include improved security measures, training in non-violent dispute resolution and crime prevention, post-incident counseling, systems to increase sensitivity to early warning signals of trouble in some employees, finding alternatives to discipline so that unions and managers can manage crises better, and ways to involve unions and employees in enhancing security and supporting people to reportharassment (the NWNL study says that less than half of employees report harassment they have undergone).

In general, a crisis prevention plan will involve a minimum of the following components:

• A crisis plan that emphasizes early identification, collaboration between different parts of the organization, and easy, non-punitive access to medical and mental health resources.
• Training for managers in early identification of problem employee situations.
• Real support from company management at the highest level for reporting of early signals of trouble.
• Thoughtful, proactive, common-sense policies to handle downsizings, layoffs, and terminations.
• Clear rules and expectations for behavior in the workplace with respect to harassment, threat of violence and violent or disruptive behavior.

Toward a new perspective: A "Climate of Control"

Crisis preparedness is good business, for two reasons. First: prevention. If the employer sets policy and implements training that sets clear limits on potential offenders, and ensures good crisis communications and response through an early warning system, he is reducing the risk of violence in the most effective way possible.

What would a "secure" workplace look like? To answer this question, we must adopt a broad perspective that examines responses to a range of crises, including threats to security through robbery or other hazards, to restructurings or layoffs, to inter-employee conflict or unrest, and finally to a threat from a current or former employee who appears unhinged or dangerous. These are problems that cry out for effective communication and appropriate responses early enough in the process to make a difference.When violence intrudes into the workplace, it creates a climate of fear and helplessness. This tears at the fabric of security, communication, and trust in management that is so crucial for health and productivity. Sound prevention policy will not guarantee safety from violent acts. It will, however, achieve an equally important objective: the creation of a climate of caring and control that has a positive effect throughout the workplace.

By taking responsibility for policies that reverse the fear and lowered confidence brought by the constant risk of violence, the employer fosters the sense that the company takes the situation seriously and knows what to do to handle it. This counteracts feelings of helplessness at all levels. For employees, it is good for morale, health, and productivity. For management, it provides guidance and tools to be more effective at monitoring and curbing dangerous or unacceptable behavior and in intervening early when behavioral or psychological problems interfere with the smooth progess of their workgroups.

Epilogue: Whose problem is it?

Workplace security must develop out of collaboration between the government and employers. Employers need the support of government programs that foster a comprehensive understanding of the causes of violence and that provide concrete direction and resources toward its prevention. Among other issues, such direction must address questions like: How are health care resources, training and education resources directed at the problem? How are disciplinary, injury and disability policies examined in relation to the issue as it manifests in a particular setting? The answers to these questions will tell a great deal about how worker concerns are dealt with over several broad areas of employee health and security.

Occupational health. The NWNL study demonstrates that workers who feel threatened or unsafe suffer the same levels of costly stress and stress-related conditions as the actual victims. Furthermore, as discussed above, perpetrators of violenceoften interact with the occupational health care or injury compensation systems prior to becoming threatening or violent. Whether the threat is robbery, violent coworkers, harassment, or a pressure-cooker workplace climate, it is in the employer's interest to provide a sense of safety by implementing programs to prevent harmful behaviors and to increase employees' security.

The role of government. Government should provide an approach to the prevention of threat and violence based on training, education, and a broad-based approach to hazard identification. This creates an alliance with the employer, rather than the adversarial relationship produced by an approach based solely on compliance. Furthermore, a purely punitive or reactive approach is not effective in the prevention of violence. A strictly enforcement-compliance approach limits government's abilityto fulfill its mission to ensure a safe workplace through education and training alongside of enforcement. This is an opportunity to reshape -- reinvent, if you will -- the role of those government agencies involved with workplace safety and health. A prevention-based approach makes better use of governmental resources.

Labor issues. Our experience is that violence prevention and stress reduction is an effort in which unions want to actively participate. Having a role in combating workplace violence and its effects provides unions with a focussed and visiblemission in the area of health and safety. Although some unions have undertaken such initiatives, others are seeking to begin or expand activities in these areas. Regarding co-worker threat, it is very much in the interest of unions to work collaborativelywith management in cases of impaired or injured employees who may become involved in protracted disputes with the employer or become violent. An alliance between Labor, Management and Government on workplace health and safety issues is crucial and overdue.

Progress in these issues is increasingly important for groups in the workforce particularly vulnerable to violence and threat. The Department of Labor'sWorkforce 2000 report states that 2 out of 3 new entrants into the labor force by the year 2000 will be women or minorities. For women, health and safety issues with regard to harassment are well-known. Women continue to be victimized in highnumbers: The Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows homicide to be the leading cause of workplace fatalities for women, at 40%. Despite increased awareness and training, harassment levels remain high: 19%, or 16.1 million workers, according to NWNL.The work is clearly just beginning: The same study reports that less than half of employees who have been harassed report the harassment.

Minorities continue to be embattled. Where a climate of worker insecurity prevails, diversity issues surface in the form of fear, conflict, and mistrust among ethnic groups. In our experience, levels of EEO complaints are high in workplaces where labor relations are poor, job security is in doubt, safety and worker security programs are neglected, and preventive health programs are absent. We have seen the racial climate in workplaces of all sorts and sizes set back twenty years in response to general insecurity about job security and availability. This is not an inevitable outcome, but the employer must step in actively when these problems surface.

Being crisis prepared is the responsibility of the employer. It has become the health and safety issue of the nineties and will increase in importance as relentless societal and economic change pursues us into the next century.

Sidebar: Scope of the problem:

Homicide is the leading cause of death in the workplace for women (40% of all workplace deaths in 1990-91, NIOSH).

An estimated 2.2 million Americans were victims of physical attacks in the workplace last year (Northwest National Life Insurance study, 1993).

25% of all workers reported physical attacks, harassment or threat of violence in their workplace last year (same study).

20% of all workers reported being physically attacked at work, lifetime (same study).

Harassment is equally or even more psychologically and occupationally disruptive than actual violence (same study).