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Security's Role in Handling Layoffs

Layoffs are an unfortunate reality in this economic climate. Security has a critical role in helping support both the departing employees and the organization.

They're also less likely to come back with guns a few weeks later. The challenged state of the economy has made executives jittery about the impact of layoffs. "For the first time, I'm hearing people in crisis management meetings say, I'm scared. I want security here,'" says Kirian Fitzgibbons, director of special services at the Steele Foundation, a San Francisco firm that handles physical security and risk management. He says that firms are far more nervous about volatile employees than they were during the dotcom bust, with more requests for extra personnel at layoff sites and for extra security on executive floors. (See How to Prepare for Workplace Violence.)

Part of that is the simple scale of the downturn—Fitzgibbons says that typically Steele consults on two to three mass layoffs a year. Right now, it's doing that many a month, and sometimes in a week.

Companies should know that being laid off is not typically something that will prompt violence. "Losing your job and losing something else is what does it," say Fitzgibbons and other security consultants.

"TIP: Randazzo recommends involving red-flag employees in the layoff process, as much as possible."

Almost every company has a "red flag" employee—someone who's had run-ins with management or other employees. During layoffs, companies need to be especially careful about how these people are treated, says Marisa Randazzo, a former chief psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service and president of Threat Assessment Resources International, a security consultancy in Sparks, Nev.

"Companies may think that the bad economy makes it a good time to get rid of bad eggs, or difficult employees. But once they're no longer part of the organization, you don't have the ability to monitor their behavior nearly as well or to do intervention," she says. Indeed, companies need to recognize that problem employees often are symptoms of bad management. Randazzo tells of a laid-off worker who threw his chair through the conference room window and threatened to come back with his guns. It turns out that the company, which put on sporting events, had hired the systems administrators with the promise of attending the event they were working on. It laid off this worker and several others just two weeks before the event, with no mention of free passes to the events.

"These folks were ticked off, understandably, because they'd been promised something and it had been taken away," she says.

Of course, the vast majority of employees are not red-flag employees. But they still need to be treated with dignity.