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How to Prepare for Workplace Violence

While you can't always predict and prevent workplace violence, you can plan to limit its impact

4. Strike preemptively. Act to deter a crisis. Segregate bickering employees' work spaces to minimize their interaction; give a comp day (or several) for an angry employee to cool off; or, give him a lateral transfer to eliminate a strained employee-manager relationship. Take discipline and performance reviews out of managers' hands and give them to a neutral third party. McGoey says the best proactive step—one he can't stress enough—is to treat people with respect. "You don't know what's going on in someone's personal life, it could be in shambles. So many people in this world are walking on eggshells. Don't demean them or embarrass them or threaten them." It's the easiest way to make a potentially violent situation actually violent.

Still, if a person is threatening violence, put your crisis plan to use. Here are some ways McGoey says you can de-escalate a situation.

5. Remove the source. Evacuate the subject of a violent person's anger. "They can't be part of the conversation," McGoey says. Have the source leave the room or send the person home. You can also arrange to protect that person until the crisis is diffused.

6. Mediate. A neutral person should intervene. The mediator should not be a uniformed security officer, police officer or high-ranking executive. Those people connote authority, and in a potentially violent situation, authority can make a person feel cornered and trigger violence. A good choice for this role could be a plainclothes security staffer trained in mediation and crisis counseling. "You have to have a competent person who knows how to de-escalate the situation" through dialogue, McGoey says.

7. Shift to neutral. If possible, take the person to a neutral location in the office. This further removes him from the source of his anger. This site should be chosen during planning; it should move the potential for violence away from other employees and give a pre-selected team member time to call the authorities if the team leader believes that's necessary.

8. Escort and warn, or disable. By now, the situation likely will have forked one of two ways: Either the person will have become violent, or he will have calmed down. If the person turns violent, disable him by pinning him to the ground, for example. Get police onsite as soon as possible. If the person appears to be calmed down, escort him completely off the premises. McGoey says companies often escort someone only out of the building, and then the person returns through a back door or waits for his target to exit the building. Also, you must give the person a "trespass warning." This is a declarative statement informing the person that he is no longer welcome on the property. "There's specific statutory language that varies from state to state that you want to use when giving this warning," says McGoey. With that, the crisis should be defused. But you still have some work to do.