Proactive Strategies for Preventing Workplace Violence

Proactive Strategies for Preventing Workplace Violence

Proactive Strategies for Preventing Workplace Violence

Picture this: a workplace where employees feel respected, safe, and valued. Sounds good, right! Unfortunately, this is not always an ideal situation. The study by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) revealed that workplace violence affects about 2 million people every year in the United States alone. These figures may be scary and mitigate your determination to conduct business. Fear not, as there are well-proven strategies that you can implement to safeguard your employees and organization. This article will discuss five effective methods to create a working environment where safety reigns supreme.

Establishing a Comprehensive Prevention Policy

Imagine a castle without robust walls; it will be prone to attacks. Similarly, the organization and employees are at risk without a workable prevention policy in the workplace. Policies are internally created and customized to fit the nature of your business. It is important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all policies, as different organizations engage in activities with varied levels of risk. Studies have shown that workplaces with clear violence policies report lower incidences. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicates that companies with violence policies experience 40% fewer cases than those without such guidelines.

The policy should define terms such as harassment, verbal abuse, and physical violence, which employees experience in the workplace. Notably, this policy document should also clearly indicate the reporting procedure, the disciplinary action to be taken, and the supportive mechanism for the victims. While some human resource directors might consider this a lot of work, it improves productivity. We, as Lauth, will conduct a proper violence assessment to give you insight into how well-prepared you are for incidences of violence.

Training and Creating Awareness among the Employees

It is self-fulfilling for a business owner to have a vigilant team that can detect threats. Employee training equips them with the necessary skills, such as interpersonal skills and conflict management, which makes them handle issues that could result in violence. The leading cause of violence within the workplace is a lack of understanding among the workforce, and appreciating diversity lessens violence. Investing in training saves time that could have been used to solve the conflict. For example, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) study showed that companies that invested in workplace violence training experienced a 70% reduction in workplace violence. Arm your team with knowledge!

Conducting Rigorous Risk Assessment

Perhaps you cannot perceive the inherent risk that violence can bring to your business because it has never happened. Or better put, take into consideration an employee who gets injured while at work due to an incidence of violence, such as a physical altercation. Picture that regarding litigations related to work injury benefit claims, and I am sure you will appreciate the need to fortify your defense. A regular risk assessment identifies the vulnerabilities within your business. Through our experienced risk assessment investigator, we identify weak points in your system and provide a comprehensive report on improvements.

Establishing Workplace Violence Prevention Teams

Having a dedicated team of guardians for preventing workplace violence is the best thing you can gift your business this year. This team is instrumental in ensuring petty issues resulting from violence are handled out immediately before they escalate. A small problem, such as miscommunication, can snowball into physical or verbal abuse. It is prudent to establish a workplace violence prevention team consisting of experts from different departments, and their primary role would be to develop and implement violence prevention strategies.

Proactive Strategies for Preventing Workplace Violence

Organizations with a workable workplace violence prevention team are good at establishing potential threats before they happen. This is supported by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which indicated that 80% of the companies with violence prevention teams reported a decrease in workplace violence incidences. As a starting point, develop a violence prevention team and track the cases within the first year. The outcome will be appealing, and for you to achieve this, we suggest helping you with a corporate culture audit to serve as a mirror of exactly how prepared you are in regard to workplace violence.

Promoting a Culture of Respect and Support

Build solidarity among your employees. Being united is a compact pillar in mitigating violence in the workplace. Successful organizations foster a culture of respect and support, which essentially prevents violence in the workforce. This is because the employees feel valued, and they tend to propagate the value of respect to the advantage of the business. How do you cultivate a culture of support and respect? This happens through encouraging open communication and enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for harassment or discrimination. These approaches create a sense of belonging, preventing conflict from escalating into violence.

Conclusion

It is undeniably true that workplace violence impedes an organization’s growth and lowers productivity. As the workforce continues to become more diverse, the chances of conflicts, hence violence, would continue in the workplace. Therefore, it is wrong to sit and wait until an incident happens in order to act. This article has highlighted the different strategies you can adopt for your enterprise and stand out in averting the repercussions that tag along with violence. Lauth can help you with your violence assessment, risk assessment, and corporate audit to mitigate violence.

Collectors Hire Private Investigators to Assist in Asset Recovery

Collectors Hire Private Investigators to Assist in Asset Recovery

When someone owes you money, no one ever said they had to make it easy to collect. Debtors have been developing new ways to dodge their debts for as long as anyone can remember. In turn, collectors across all industries have had to develop methods of collection to prevent people from hiding an asset. One of a collector’s greatest assets in this modern age is an independent private investigator. While collectors deal with the paperwork, private investigators do the legwork, using proven methodology to unearth the hidden assets of debtors in arears.

Private investigators work with some of the same tools and the same methodology as law enforcement when looking for debtor assets. As part of their licensure, private investigators have access to verified databases that allow them to develop comprehensive, cross-referenced background profiles on a Subject in any investigation. Private investigators have diverse experience in analyzing a person’s criminal, financial, address, and litigation history in order to build a contextualized picture of a debtor’s circumstances. Private investigators can unearth unseen assets like property, financial accounts, vehicles, and other valuable assets that have been previously concealed. Human sources are less common in asset searches, but private investigators also have the training to build rapport and garner testimony from relevant human sources in the case.  Private investigators are also highly skilled in obtaining and reviewing litigation records to document a debtor’s history of litigation in a court of law. Pervasive lawsuits, especially involving large judgements, can be a red flag in an asset search investigation.

Social media has become a more valuable resource than ever in many types of investigations. The amount of information people unwittingly give away on social media is staggering. Private investigators can get information about the sale of personal belongings, photos of assets like property and vehicles, and can document the type of lifestyle a debtor is currently enjoying—like lavish vacations or expensive home renovations. Private investigators carefully document their findings to compile into a thorough report for the client as another building block in their case against the debtor in arears.

If you’re a collecting party trying to reap your due, don’t hesitate to reach out to private investigator for a quote on their asset search services. Through open-source intelligence and transparent investigation methods, private investigators can get to the bottom of a debtors hidden assets.

Protecting Your Assets with a Background Check

Protecting Your Assets with a Background Check

Background Check to Protect Your Assets in Marriage
When you’re considering marriage, you should also considering running a background check on your partner to protect your assets.

Even if you didn’t meet your significant other in cyberspace, you could still be at risk for con artists and scammers. That’s why more individuals are turning to private investigators to perform background checks on their potential life mates.

One of the most critical decisions we make in life is who to legally bind ourselves to in matrimony—not only because of the vows we make to each other, but also because the legal union in most states means entitling the other person to half of your assets. There is an unexpected trend of private investigators—especially female private investigators—in countries where arranged marriage is woven into the fabric of culture. Many families seek to control familial relations and extensions for many reasons, like politics, financials, business consolidation, and status. As recently as 2017, arranged marriage accounted for 55% of marriages throughout the globe, leaving traditional marriage in the minority. This creates a niche market for private investigators to properly vet potential spouses in countries like India, China, Pakistan, Japan, and Israel to name a few.

Even though arranged marriage is not a major part of Western culture, that doesn’t mean that engaged individuals in the United States shouldn’t do their due-diligence when it comes to their life mate. When it comes to your assets, you should expect facts, not fiction. That’s why hiring a private investigator to perform a background check on your intended can save a great deal of heartache and financial distress. Even a basic background check from a private investigator can unearth risk factors. Private investigators will pull criminal history, litigation history, credit history, and history of residence to corroborate proposed facts about your romantic partner. It’s true that there are many “people finder” databases on the internet that claim their results are accurate and worth the cost of purchasing the report, and therefore an individual could conduct a background check themselves. However, private investigators must comply with specific security protocol and licensing in order to have access to verified databases on par with certain law enforcement agencies. This means that the quality of data entry comes with a much higher degree of accuracy, and will be updated regularly with regards to both public and private records. “People finder” databases cannot guarantee 100% accuracy, which may lead to additional misinformation, especially with regards to criminal and litigation history.

Private investigators also have years of experience that contextualize available information on a subject. For example, residence history is traditionally part of a basic background check. If the subject has a long history of moving between jurisdictions, or from state-to-state in short periods of time, a private investigator might examine this information—and based on context—determine that the subject has a history of transience, which could indicate a lack of reliability or a flight risk. If a subject’s credit history is consistently poor, that would be a financial red flag that might disqualify a subject as a spouse.

Private investigators bring valuable contexts to background investigations that empower individuals to make critical decisions in their private or corporate life. When two people get married, they often conduct other litmus tests in order to determine long-term cohabitation, such as blood tests for their health, or pre-marital counseling to determine their level of preparation. Background checks are just another measure for you to ensure that your life and your livelihood are protected.

Active Shooter Events in the Workplace

Active Shooter Events in the Workplace

Virginia legislation placed on notice following the active shooter event in Virginia Beach.

Victims of the Virginia Beach shooting.

In what has seemed like a death from a thousand cuts, the mass active shooter event that occurred on Friday, May 28th at a municipal building in Virginia Beach has inspired action on the part of state leadership. According to USA Today, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has ordered a legislative session devoted to exploring the current climate of gun violence in the United states. At a news conference, Northam said, “The nation is watching. We must do more than our thoughts and prayers. We must give Virginians the action they deserve.”

It was a public works employee who killed 12 people last week—another senseless tragedy in a long line of mass shootings that have spiked in recent years. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, shootings accounted for 79% of all workplace homicides in 2016. Statistics from the Office of Victims of Violent Crime indicate this number has not only risen dramatically but will continue to rise. The number of mass shootings was nearly 2.5 times greater over the last ten years—greater than the mass shootings that occurred between 1998 and 2007.

This infographic displays the number of active shooter events in each state in 2018, per 1 million individuals.

While the governor of Virginia has put the legislation on notice, businesses throughout the nation have put themselves on notice as well, with interest in active shooter training programs for businesses increasing exponentially with each new report of gun violence in the workplace. What’s chilling is OSHA estimates 25% of workplace violence goes unreported.  Yet, many businesses believe events like the ones that transpired in Virginia Beach cannot happen to them.

Many businesses not only believe an active shooter event is unlikely, but that they are, in fact, prepared for one. If you happen to be reading this at your desk, or on a break at your job, do you know the evacuation protocol for your business in the event of an active shooter? Evacuation procedures like these are often explained in personnel materials like handbooks and manuals. But the average employee is not regularly engaged on the topic, let alone received comprehensive education & demonstration of these protocols. It is a morbid, serious subject, and it is not uncommon for management or leadership in a business/organization to be uncomfortable with addressing it, and certainly struggle with addressing it comprehensively.

This downloadable graphic reflects statistical information pertaining to the 220 FBI-designated active shooter incidents that occurred in the United States between 2000-2016. This graphic depicts incidents broken down by location category.

Companies who have decided that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure are investing in contracts with independent investigators to perform risk assessments on their headquarters and locations of business. These investigators consider factors such as the total volume of personnel, layout of the worksite, and security protocol to determine what is needed to keep the employees safe and secure.

These horrific crimes are also placing a heavy financial burden on businesses. Lower & Associates estimates businesses across the United States will lose more than $55 million in employee wages each year due to violence in the workplace. They experience direct losses in the form of medical expenses, workers’ compensation, litigation fees, and indirect losses such as breakdown in operations due to arrested productivity, record-low morale, and public relation nightmares. Not to mention the fact that a business’s preparedness for an active shooter event is literally a matter of life and death.


3 Most Common Types of Corporate Crisis

What is a corporate crisis? While exact definitions may differ, a corporate crisis is generally defined as “an event, situation, or public initiative that threatens the company’s ability to effectively operate its business. A crisis can escalate into a disaster or long-term impediment to business growth if not handled with efficiency and sensitivity to all involved.” This is a large umbrella that encompasses many of the internal issues we associate with companies, including (but not limited to) fraud, theft, misconduct, and harassment of all kinds.

A majority of corporate crises fall into one of three categories: personnel, systemic, and contextual.

  1. A personnel crisis is an internal issue that is a direct result of an individual employee or a group of employees’ bad behavior. Theft by personnel is one of the most widely-reported crises in corporations throughout America. The scope of this problem can be as small as stealing office supplies all the way up to executive embezzlement. Sexual harassment is a type of personnel crisis receiving a welcomed new level of attention in corporations. In the age of the #MeToo movement, corporations are viewing their workforce very differently when it comes to identifying potential predators in their midst in the name of a “pound of cure.” Prudent steps taken when vetting potential hires and current employees has saved companies difficulties down the line, especially in legal fees and public relations.
  2. A systemic crisis refers to a major breakdown in operations negatively impacting business. A common example is food service corporations that receive a sudden influx of food poisoning complaints. Source of the outbreak may be traced back to how the supplier or distributor handled the food product, and suddenly, there’s a systemic crisis: A misstep in operations led to a large sum of incidents. Systemic problems manifest themselves in many forms, including external theft. Repeated theft, both in cyberspace and the real world, is often the result of insufficient security within a company. Consequently, the company incurs loss because they remain vulnerable. Companies who have chronic turnover due to employee misconduct may have flaws in their vetting system for potential employees. That is another example of a crucial operation where a breakdown occurs and erodes a company’s profits with labor hours to hire a new individual to fill a vacant position.
  3. A contextual crisis has exponential consequences for a business relative to its size. These are the types of crises that companies cannot anticipate, because they influence public perception of their brand based on real-life events. A major news story like a mass shooting, or a major criminal case, or a lawsuit, can negatively impact a brand even if that event is not directly associated with that company. These external events can drastically change a company’s internal operations, and can weigh heavy on employees at every level. Sexual harassment is another example of this type of crisis in motion. The media coverage regarding high-level Hollywood executives like Harvey Weinstein and his alleged history of abuse have executives in companies of all shapes and sizes revisiting their human resource policies and practices when it comes to addressing sexual misconduct in the workplace. Internal operations receive a major overhaul to the benefit of a healthier work environment for everyone.

When it comes to corporate crises, not all businesses will be able to afford specialized investigators to work in-house to resolve issues that arise. Even if they can afford these professionals, investigators employed by the company—regardless of the quality of their work—by definition cannot provide a truly objective solution to any problem. Because they’re employed by the corporation, they have a potential stake in the outcome of the investigation, whether that stake be real or perceived. Hiring an independent professional, like a licensed private investigator, to conduct an external investigation is the best way to ensure that the solution is objective. This is particularly important personnel crises, because terminating personnel based on an unbiased investigation is kerosene for a disgruntled employee that can manifest itself with many devastating consequences—most commonly wrongful termination lawsuits. Private investigators can assist in systemic crises as well, like the example of repeated thefts with regards to security. Private investigators who specialize in different kinds of risk assessment can identify a company’s vulnerabilities to thieves and scammers, and provide them with a game plan to improve their security.

If your business has encountered a corporate crisis, call Lauth Investigations International today for a free consultation. Learn how we can provide you with an objective solution to your corporate crisis. Call 317-951-1100, or learn more about our services here.