Putting an End to Workplace Violence

What does it take to create a safe environment for employees? Park Dietz and other experts and CSOs discuss how to head off a security department's worst nightmare: Workplace violence.

As one of the world's foremost forensic psychiatrists, Dr. Park Dietz has researched workplace violence for over 20 years, interviewing the perpetrators and examining the causes of such events. (He is also president of Threat Assessment Group, or TAG, a workplace violence training and consulting company, and a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.) Dietz was the government's expert witness in prosecuting John Hinckley Jr., Jeffrey Dahmer, Erik Menendez, Ted Kaczynski and Andrea Yates.

One of Dietz's earliest findings in researching the subject of workplace violence was that shootings, harassing letters or parking lot brawls are never how problems begin. "Threats were not how a case started; threats were how it almost always ended," he says. And it's that discovery that lies at the root of the TAG programcalled Supporting a Nonviolent Workplacewhich he helped research and develop with 3M.

While lots of companies have crisis management plans that kick into gear in an emergency, far fewer have examined what they could do to head off these security crises in the first place. "You have to develop methods of preventing threats instead of waiting until you have a threat to prevent the violence," says Dietz.

The argument is often made that an obsession with guns and violence as entertainment makes the United States a ripe breeding ground for these kinds of events. That may be true, but workplace violence encompasses much more than the gunman who commits a multiple-victim shooting. The FBI defines workplace violence to be any action that could threaten the safety of an employee, impact an employee's physical or psychological well-being, or cause damage to company property. That encompasses everything from stalking, threats, intimidation, violence as a byproduct of a robbery or other crime, bullying, sexual harassment and domestic violence. When the full breadth of workplace violence is measured, data from the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency focused on human and labor rights, shows that the United States actually has one of the lowest rates of workplace violence in the industrial west. The far more common forms of workplace aggression such as threats, bullying and intimidation are universal trends that other countries have a far greater problem with than the United States. "The rates in Canada are significantly higher than in the U.S., and France and Argentina are off the charts," says Dietz. But that data is roundly ignored abroad, and CSOs of multinationals are likely to find that their foreign counterparts are unenthusiastic about instituting a workplace violence program. However, if you use terms that sound less American such as a program to prevent "bullying," "mobbing" or "rude behavior," they will admit to having those problems.