Exposure to work-related violence and aggression can have significant short and long-term impacts on a worker’s physical and psychological health. It is also a significant contributor of mental stress claims in Australia.

What is workplace violence and aggression?

Workplace aggression is a real and everyday risk to most employees. They may be sworn at, threatened or even assaulted.

It can happen at the normal workplace but also:

• Where a worker is working remotely
• Where a worker is working at a different location (such as a client’s home)
• At a work-event or social activity (The risk is much higher if alcohol is consumed)
• Electronically (abusive text messages, social media posts etc)

What is your duty as an employer?

Your organisation has a duty of care to remove, or reduce the risks associated with work-related violence and aggression.

 

To achieve this, the very first step is to conduct a risk assessment. Always consult with your workers to find out whether your employees ever feel threatened or worried.   This will assist you to implement control measures that address the risks appropriately.

It is important that your processes address the following:

• Physical work environment, such as workplace layout and barriers
• Security measures
• Access control
• How to identify a potential situation how to defuse it
• How to deal with an aggressor
• How to exit to a safe location, including evacuation procedures
• Support available to affected workers, including post-incident

 

Training

Regardless of what precautions you may take, violence and aggression can still happen and it’s therefore of paramount importance that you provide your employees with training in how to strategically handle and withdraw from a situation, should it arise.

A good start would be to provide an effective, relevant online training course with the following outcomes for trainees:

• Understand aggressive and violent behaviour and what causes it
• Self-awareness: What are your own anger triggers and how to control them
• Spot early signs of aggression
• Preventing conflict escalation
• Understand negative vocabulary and body language
• Evasive self-defence
• Post incident response
• How to recover and unwind

 

Need help?

If you would like assistance with strategies and resources to address workplace violence and aggression or to find out more about online training, please contact us today.