WPV programs should address behavioral issues, not just physical incidents
A workplace violence prevention (WPV) program built primarily around physical incidents risks overlooking the behaviors that precede them.
“Focusing solely on severe incidents misses the underlying environment entirely,” says Deb Muller, founder and CEO of HR Acuity. “Verbal threats, harassment, and bullying have to be treated as indicators of potential escalation.”
Behavioral problems often develop gradually, rather than beginning with an obviously serious event. Behavior such as pushing boundaries or slinging microaggressions disguised as jokes builds over time, she says.
“No one walks into their workplace and says, ‘I think I’m going to try out this sexual harassment thing today,’ ” she says.
The challenge is capturing those smaller events in a way that allows them to be analyzed collectively. A manager may document a behavioral problem, security may respond to another event involving the same employee, and human resources (HR) may receive a separate complaint.
“Maybe security gets alerted to an incident, but it never makes it to HR,” says Muller. “If this information is centralized, you can start connecting the dots.”
Hospitals should also standardize how behavioral incidents are categorized. Different terminology for essentially the same behavior makes trend analysis difficult.
“If a boundary-pushing comment is logged as an interpersonal conflict in one department and a workplace disruption in another, you can’t spot a repeat offender moving between teams if every manager is describing the behavior differently,” she says.
Centralizing and standardizing the information can reveal concentrations of lower-level incidents around a particular employee, department, or shift.
“When incidents are captured consistently in a single source of truth, that’s where the power lies,” says Muller. “You can spot a specific shift or individual with a spike in minor incidents, and you can step in to intervene long before it becomes a crisis.”
Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from our Healthcare Safety Leader newsletter.