For Pitney Bowes Inc., the trend of workplace violence has gotten worrisome enough that it has resorted to firing employees over the telephone if the company has any suspicion an employee could act out. It also awards hefty severance packages on the condition that they stay away from the workplace.
At Pitney Bowes, a company of some 35,000 people, as many as 100 cases annually are assessed by a critical incident prevention team, according to Ann Romanello, manager in global ethics and business practices at Pitney Bowes.
The Society for Human Resources Management hosted a seminar in Norwalk on the topic of preventing workplace violence, on the heels of a similar session Sept. 21 in Wethersfield hosted by the Connecticut Department of Labor”™s division of occupational safety and health. The seminars were scheduled in the wake of the Manchester beer distributor shootings that left nine dead, and multiple more high-profile incidences of workplace violence across the nation.
Romanello added that human-resources personnel are trained to divert blame for a termination decision to “corporate,” with the goal of redirecting any hostile feelings away from superiors or coworkers at the site where that employee worked.
Reading the clues of employees
“When I”™m looking at cases, I go backward, and you can see the clues they left behind,” Romanello said. “People say, oh that”™s just how Joe is ”¦ when in fact there are warnings signs out there.
Human resources managers need to get out into the employee “community” to better spot those signs, agreed Dan Arenovski, associate director of security at Stamford-based Purdue Pharma.
“I”™m not talking about cultivating informants or anything,” Arenovski said. “But there”™s a reason we get ”¦ that gut feeling. Why do I feel this way? Maybe someone else has picked up on it too.”
Romanello noted that workplace violence is often the result of multiple stresses on the home front that build up for an employee, with an assault finally triggered by a problem or conflict at work. She added that those ill feelings can linger.
“We have one (case) that we are still dealing with four years later,” Romanello added. “Four years later.”
Romanello was speaking from a position of authority in more ways than one ”“ she said she has been attacked multiple times herself, in her career as a nurse.
Hospitals can be problematic
Danbury Hospital made national headlines this summer, after the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration recommended a fine over what OSHA said were lax security policies that had contributed to multiple attacks in recent years, including a nonfatal shooting in March. Hospital violence was in the news again last month, after a fatal shooting at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Hospitals pose particular problems due to their open facilities that allow people to come and go freely, noted Anthony Aceto, vice president of human resources at Norwalk Hospital.
“My team is undertaking a series of steps to see what we can do to manage and mitigate risk,” Aceto said. “Johns Hopkins struck a chord.”
Sharon Budds, human resources business manager at Bank of Ireland Capital Markets in Stamford, said her company did an assessment of the bank”™s human resources policies and how they impact security.
“What we found out is that we did have things that were going to be useful to us,” Budds said. “We had at the bank a very strong sense of ”¦ dignity. That is part of the process of how we ”˜onboard”™ people, ”¦ but also how we handle terminations ”“ making sure people felt they were being exited in a dignified way, in a way in which they weren”™t being threatened or embarrassed.”
