A Study of Workplace Violence

Workplace violence is rampant in most institutions worldwide. Modern managers in American institutions experience numerous cases of workplace violence every day. In fact, the number of workplace violence has risen to billions since 1995 (Kerr, 2011). This form of violence can be either external or internal. In most cases, victims are affected psychologically. The workplace violence destroys organization’s property, scares away potential customers and reduces the number of creative workers of the organizations. Therefore, it is the major disadvantage to any organization.

Guerin (2010) contends that when mentioned, most managers may not take it seriously, thinking that it occurs only in movies or media. Nonetheless, this phenomenon continues to grow drastically, may be caught up and be experienced by any organization. Therefore, it is extremely important for managers to take an initiative of protecting their organization and employees, before the phenomena strikes. Therefore, this paper will highlight different techniques that management should employ in prevention or reduction of workplace violence.

Almost all institutions have already adopted the workplace safety policies and hanged them all over strategic places in their firms.

Nevertheless, this is not adequate, since workers will not just read and implement the policy. Thus, the company administrations need to go extra miles in systematizing implementation of the policies through facilitating training of both new and old workers about workplace safety and violence, security procedures, workers’ duties in telling on cases of violence, different ways of managing stress, conflict resolution and mediation among others. This will help the staff to understand different ways of appreciation the workplace safety apart from gaining skills of handling such violence.

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Moreover, the management needs to compile a violence combating team, which will closely deal with instilling and maintaining work place discipline and dealing with violence. This should include security team, human resource management and medical among others. The main duty of this team will be to evaluate any violence-related processes and actions (Guerin, 2010). For instance, the human resource will check on individuals who cause violence, factors that lead to their violence and circumstances under which they may be violent. In other words, teams should have assigned tasks and responsibilities on gathering information on issues of violence. For example, a security team should be formed to enhance security of the employees or subjects under threat through consistent but dignified monitoring of the violent subject (Denenberg & Braverman, 2001). Medical team may act on correcting behavior of the violent subject. The medical team may also help the subjects in different ways of dealing with their personal stress. Finally, a human resource team should be tasked with the duty of warning an employee of any possibility of fire on the reasonable grounds.

Additionally, the management needs to adopt decent communication culture through its public relations department. The public relations department should establish a company’s culture in communication, where staff and management get training on how they may communicate amongst themselves (Reynolds, 2005). This is very important because through this both the staff and the management will know how to communicate important points without irritating each other. As a result, the adoption of formal communication skills will reduce cases of violence. On its part, the company should also try its level best to avoid triggering violence. The company should be willing to employ all possible conflict resolution mechanisms and satisfaction of the emotional and professional needs of its workers because mounting so much pressure on the workers triggers violence.

To sum up, the workplace violence is costly. It destroys company’s assets, claims lives and health of workers apart from scaring away the clients, thus rendering the company less competitive. Therefore, it is important for the management to train the staff on the workplace safety practices, create teams that will enhance the workplace security and tune the company’s communication system so that it may reduce aggression in the institution.