assistance please
LeeR
142 Posts
i am doing a course paper as part of MBA on violence in the workplace. any situations you have experienced and solutions you have tried would be helpful, costs incurred etc would be very appreciated.
Comments
The lady returned to work and tried to get into the old department, yelling at employees that in her opinion, had testified against her, banging on doors and windows. She followed people in the parking garage with her car. It was absolutely nuts.
Thankfully, we have a well laid out policy about what constitutes violence in the workplace and were able to use escalating disciplinary measures to deal with this senario. If we had not drafted the policy with provisions that included threats, real and perceived, I'm not sure where we'd be!
WOW! At 5'2" and 110#, I'd been just another deer caught in the headlights.
Elizabeth
A supervisor and an ee began an arguement in our building. The ee is from South America, was a certifed teacher and harbored much resentment because she worked for someone she considered as having less qualifications than she. This ee was usually poised, articulate, friendly, etc. I do not remember what started the arguement. The ee angrily walked away from the confrontation and her supervisor followed her to the parking lot, demanding they settle the situation. The ee kept ignoring her and the supervisor grabbed her by the forearm, telling her she must speak with her.
The ee became hysterical, claimed she was assaulted and launched a complaint. Senior mgt was out of the building at a mandatory training. My hr assistant immediately jumped in and required both parties to fill out an incident report, located two witnesses and asked them to do the same.
The ee, took her complaint to our Exec Dir the next day, and began adding to her written description, adding language barriers as a part of the reason. Her supervisor is quite fluent in spanish. Then the ee filed a criminal complaint with the local gendarmes and consulted an attorney to address civil issues. I do not know what her costs were.
We put both staff on a paid administrative leave for one week (about $1,200). Called a board member, who is a noted local criminal attorney with great contacts, who advised us to encourage our ees to only discuss this with him present. His services were free to us, but we would have easily incurred about 10 hours with him, say $2,000. Several hours of admin time was burned in this process, probably a total of 20 hours at various payrates, say another $1,000. We wanted to put both ees on a development plan, but because of the third party attorneys involved (the supervisor also contacted her own attorney to protect her civil exposure), we were advised not to give the appearance of taking sides in the issue. We indicated to both that violence in the workplace was not to be tolerated, and that insubordination was not to be tolerated, and that the discussion was held in an inappropriate location (next to our lobby), and suggested the each participate in anger management classes. Finally we had the ee report to the Program Director. The ee eventually resigned, citing unrelated health issues. The supervisor is still with us.
That is the reason we advise our employees, especially management/supervisors, not to touch. We had a case where a customer was about to walk out of the store without paying for a prescription. The assistant manager put his hand on her shoulder and told her that she had forgotten to pay for her script. The customer was an administrative law judge for unemployment hearings, in other words a lawyer. She sued for assault and battery and it went to jury trial. She lost and also had to pay our attorney fees. She is still a law judge but never hears our appeals. Total cost, really don't know but lots of lost work hours for the store and our attorneys.
Elizabeth
My point is that there is a limit to what HR can do, but we have an ethical and fiscal responsibility to do that much. I believe it is important to have a strong zero-tolerance policy on workplace violence of every sort. Employees should have a safe way to report any incidents. All incidents should be handled immediately and decisively by HR.
Keep meticulous records on each action; teach safety at work; have a plan if something gets out of control; treat physical violence as a crime; have a crisis code that anyone can use over an intercom system to get help; train you employees to be aware of their surroundings and notice when something isn't right.
I am reminded of all the Postal shootings (and others) and it is amazing to me than an individual holding a rifle can just walk into a business unnoticed by nearly everyone. Yikes!
Fortunately for me, I have not gone through some of the stories mentioned, but of course that could change in the next 5 minutes, tomorrow, etc.
What's very interesting to me is how people define threatening behavior which could quite possibly lead to a violent situation.
Case in point: I was about 4 weeks into my current position, when I had to terminate an employee. This employee was TROUBLE in that he didn't show up to work on time, he was working a reduced schedule - not because anyone here liked it - but because he had a specialized skill and they were allowing him to get away with it. In addition, another HR person at the company was loaning the guy money, taking his live-in girlfriend and her daughter to the food banks and the list continued. A physical description may be in order, he was about 35 at the time, and looked older, he had blonde, stringy hair, was really skinny (or wiry) and he didn't bathe often. When I came on board & I put an immediate stop to most of the behavior and required him to work full-time and be on time, if not he would face disciplinary action. Of course he didn't follow it and so, I brought him into my office to terminate. I always have a second person in the term meetings so I have a witness & in this case, I asked the employee's supervisor to attend. At the meeting, I told him we were going to let him go for failure to meet the corrective action requirements. I turned my head away from the employee to grab a document & was startled to hear movement. I looked at the supervisor & he had re-positioned himself so that he could reach the employee if he needed to and his face was pretty grim. Once the meeting was done, the employee left (escorted) (he lived across the street from work) and I asked the supervisor what had happened & he explained that when I turned my head away, the employee gave me - in his words - the most evil look the supervisor had ever seen and the employee had actually clinched his fist and leaned forward a bit in his chair. This shocked me. I thanked the supervisor for his 'protection' and I waited until the other HR person arrived back in the office and told her what happened. Since she had a motherly type of relationship with the employee, she walked across the street to have a word with him. The time is about 10:45 a.m. and the employee was sitting on his porch, looking directly into our front offices and drinking one of those huge cans of beer. When she spoke with him, they went in the house and she saw he had a gun on the table. She didn't mention anything to him about the gun & she worked out our pre-arranged agreement with him (we were going to let him collect UI - rather than appeal - so it would not be such a blow to him financially) and she returned to the office. Scary stuff huh? Well, it was only scary to the three of us according to the other managers and even the CEO at the time, namely because this employee had worked for the company on and off for a several years and they all "knew" him. Our fears were pushed aside & we all got back to business without any further incident from this employee - luckily. Later, since the house he lived in belonged to another employee, we heard a lot about this employee after he skipped town. Crack pipes were littered throughout the house, walls had holes in them from someone punching them, doors were off their hinges and the whole place was trashed. I always wonder what could have happened if one more 'straw' had fallen in place and it proved to be the last one for the employee. Would he have snapped?
Sometimes, even with all the precautions in the world, you can't protect against the unexpected and it's very difficult, in some cases, to distinguish a dirty look, from the dirty look that could be the precursor to violence.
It also sounds like his supervisor was aware enough of his imbalance to be on guard in your office. You should buy that person a beer and thank them again.
At my last company I was an HR Assistant but basically handled ALL HR functions. I reported to the HR Director who was, for lack of a better term, useless. Anyway we had an employee who had been on a LOA for quite a while for a variety of issues. She used up all STD benefits and I found out she was collecting UI. I brought this to the attention of the HR Director who instructed me to contact the UI office to stop the payments. I did as instructed. About 4 days later this EE (female) comes into the building and asks to speak with me. I brought her into a conference room where she immediately began a tirade about WHY the UI was stopped and showed me a letter that informed her she had received about $1,000 in UI that she was not qualified for. I explained the situation to her and informed her that I was doing as I was instructed and if she had questions she should talk to the HR Director. After some more verbal "bashing" from her, she threw the papers at me and left the conference room. I went back to my desk and about 5 minutes later she came to my work area (walked right past the receptionist) and continued verbally "bashing" me using quite a few vulgar words and, although I made repeated statements to her that I was not responsible for the decision regarding her UI and that she needed to speak with the HR Director. She wasn;t hearing any of it.
This continued for about 15 minutes all the while other employees in the office failed to do ANYTHING about this situation. FINALLY she left (after taking a swing at me and missing) and waited upstairs for the HR Director (who conveniently returned about 5 minutes later). AFTER he spoke to her I gave him a synopsis of what had transpired during the previous 30 minutes or so with her and he informed me that it was MY decision of what to do. He failed to take any initiative to address the situation with her and let it fall completely in my lap. Unfortunately due to the size of the town we live in and the fact that the vehicle I have is only one of two like it in town, my fear of being retaliated against by her (she had a string of convictions regarding assault, etc.) caused me to decline taking any legal action.
Needless to say I no longer work for that company.