Workplace Violence Warning Signs
N E W Y O R K, Dec. 27 -- If workers alert supervisors about strange behavior in fellow employees, they may be able to avoid what happened to the seven workers who were shot to death at their Wakefield, Mass., offices Tuesday, workplace experts say.
People often think shootings such as the one that occurred at Edgewater Technology happen because a person “just snaps,” but Steve Kaufer, the founder of the Workplace Violence Research Institute in Palm Springs, Calif., says that isn’t so: “There are red flags that lead up to an incident of workplace violence.”
Warning signals are apparent in two-thirds of the cases, agrees Dr. Theodore Feldmann, associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, in Kentucky. Defining workplace violence as any type of threat or violence occurring in a work environment, he wrote in a 1999 report: “No occupational setting is immune from workplace violence. Likewise, no individual is safe from this type of attack.”
Signs of Stress
Kaufer says people tend to display signs of stress that need to be addressed whether or not an employer believes they will lead to violence. Companies should train employees to look out for those changes in behavior that may indicate a co-worker is going through a difficult time, he says.
If a normally social employee starts withdrawing, or someone who comes in to work on time starts showing up late, that person may be stressed, Kaufer explains. “It doesn’t mean that the individual is going to come to work with a gun and injure someone,” he says. “But it does mean that the individual needs to be talked to and counseled to find out if there’s something the employer can do to assist them in whatever stress they’re going through.”
Reduced productivity, inconsistent work quality, strained co-worker relations, safety violations, depression and frequently blaming others are other characteristics managers should monitor in a potentially violent worker.
