Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Brian Strauser, principal and chief executive here at BrightPath in episode 192. I want to talk about some incidents of the past couple of weeks and what people are calling us about in relation to workplace violence prevention and threat management. And I'm gonna keep this episode pretty simple. Um, I'm recording this, uh, on Tuesday, yesterday there was a shooting, a workplace involved shooting in Louisville, Kentucky that resulted in the deaths of five individuals, the wounding of several others. Um, and there's still people in harm's way as they kind of fight in the hospital in critical condition from a shooting that was undertaken by a bank employee and perhaps a former bank employee. Some of the details are not yet clear. Um, but we've gotten several questions the last 24 hours here at Breit Path about what should companies do in terms of workplace violence prevention and threat management.
Speaker 0 00:01:06 And I'll keep it simple. There's a handful of things that mature organizations tackle related to workplace violence. And here's what they are first, that you need a strong workplace violence prevention and threat management program in your organization. And at a minimum, there needs to be three things in that program. There needs to be a clear corporate policy that outlines the creation of the program. It charters the program. Here's some information, and it makes it clear that threats of workplace violence are not acceptable in the workplace. Second, there needs to be a method to report threats of workplace violence. There is a centralized place where these are reported. And third, there needs to be an individual or a team that is responsible for managing these threats of violence. Then you need a method to document all of the reported threats and acts of workplace violence. You can have an incident reporting system, you could get something fancy.
Speaker 0 00:02:10 You could build something custom. You could build something custom in Salesforce. These are all things we've seen companies do. Or you can just have a dang spreadsheet to start. Don't overcomplicate it, start with something. But you need a way to document this so that you have a handle on what's going on and what are the challenges that you're faced with. Next, you need a trained cross-functional team, a threat assessment and management team. Their job is to assess threats of workplace violence and then create plans. They're gonna take action to mitigate the likelihood of escalation from a threat to an actual attack to an actual incident. The team's focused is about taking actions to protect your organization, your employees, your customers, your visitors. You need then to have regular reporting
Speaker 1 00:02:59 To stakeholders across the organization about the number of threats on workplace violence incidents and the outcomes of that. You need to explain the problem and how you're addressing that by using the data. And then you need to connect that process that you've built for threat assessment and management to your process of managing a crisis so that when a major incident occurs, and God forbid when it occurs, that you have a smooth transition from managing the threat to managing the crisis. Now, we have some resources that can help you with this, and a lot of them are free. We have a masterclass on the four steps to successfully manage threats of workplace violence. You can get it on our website, I think it's 60 to 70 minutes long. Uh, it will outline the four steps to successfully managing these kind of threats. We have a free course on workplace violence prevention and threat management, um, that you can find on our website.
Speaker 1 00:04:01 And lastly, we have paid course, the Managing Threats Workshop that will help you better equip your team with the training, the resources, and the confidence that they need to effectively manage threats. And lastly, you can work with someone like us where we can help you establish, grow and mature your workplace violence prevention and threat management program. These are all things that in my mind, mature organizations do. That you put these things in place so that you can manage threats and, and scary behavior coming from employees or from outside parties that might choose to, uh, threaten the organization, um, so that you can mitigate the likelihood of a violent attack on your organization. That's it for this edition of The Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode. Be well.
