Protecting staff from physical assaults and traumatic events

Raechel Gavin at Sonder argues that managers need holistic thinking to support under-threat employees

The British Retail Consortium’s recent report - showing a 50% leap in attacks on shop workers - has added to the concerns of senior executives, HR and wellbeing teams responsible for their employees’ safety and wellbeing. This study comes only weeks after ONS data showed a sharp 2.6% increase in UK workforce sickness and injury absence rates in 2022. 

Staff safety is clearly an urgent and widespread challenge; a recent report from Sonder shows that 28% of employees across all sectors have been threatened or assaulted in public.

Well-meaning but harmful

While managers’ natural desire is to make timely and well-intentioned responses to help people affected by these issues, different industries have encountered difficulties when mobilising well-meaning but ultimately unscientific incident responses. 

Firms may in the past have initiated a standard response to traumatic events, involving counselling and psychological debriefings, for all employees affected. However, successive research shows this approach can do more harm than good, because around 75% of people undergoing such experiences recover without psychological interventions. Counselling can reawaken traumatic events to those otherwise successfully recovering.

A proven alternative could be Psychological First Aid (PFA) which gives staff access to physical, emotional and social support. It can be delivered in the workplace by suitably trained managers and colleagues as well as specialist providers.

A further pressing issue for businesses is addressing employee burnout which is in any case a challenging and multi-faceted task: many managers try to curb this problem with simple, short-term tactics like allowing extra paid time off.

However a considerable body of workplace research attributes burnout problems to particular work and employee personality factors, in combination with wider and unresolved workplace management issues. Companies need holistic and empathetic responses to challenges like burnout which consider and address the underlying causes.

Holistic thinking

Given these difficulties, companies should investigate options such as holistic and clinically evidenced support programmes to help employees manage different risks. Management teams should also try to avoid standardised corporate incident responses or unscientific, ‘quick fixes.’ Successfully implementing new wellbeing programmes demands new ground rules for companies, particularly around their expectations of employees and managers. 

Organisations should consider how to get better information from employees about the threats they face and develop workplace cultures that more rapidly and actively engage employees. A workplace culture in which colleagues feel safe to raise issues and ask for help is also key.

If you don’t measure something, you can’t understand it and act on potential problems. Many management teams lack the sort of insights about employees’ work conditions that would enable fast and effective allocation of support, 

But these knowledge gaps often result from ‘siloed’ management information: many safety reporting systems have been set up separately from those of HR, mental health and wellbeing. If these different data sources could be merged and analysed, firms could gain a better understanding of the type of risks that shop workers or lone workers face and actions needed to mitigate them. 

New wellbeing cultures: technology the catalyst

Organisations must create a wellbeing culture with reliable, trusted, and easier-to-use systems for employees to report incidents of abuse or aggression. 

Deeper, real-time workforce-wide data will help managers react more quickly and decisively, otherwise employees’ reports will remain anecdotal and managers’ ability to support employees will be constrained. 

A hospitality group rapidly engaged employees with its new workforce safety programme by providing a ’check on me’ safety application, activated through each employee’s mobile device. The service has seen such widespread and rapid uptake - generating 60,000 reports in one year - that it has transformed managers’ understanding of potential risks to their employees and the value to employees of the application itself. 

At another company, data from a wellbeing and safety platform identified that the peak time for shift workers seeking support help was 5 am, quickly validating the provision of 24/7 wellbeing support.

Revisiting wellbeing plans

Frontline workers shouldn’t have to be preparing for physical battles while line managers cannot be expected to act as psychologists, doctors and emergency services. Instead of relying on busy line managers to keep the lid on employees’ fears, organisations could instead investigate expert post-incident support programmes for their people after troubling incidents. This intervention should include support for different medical, mental health and safety concerns.

Dedicated support 

Providers of employee safety programmes report frequent instances of workers not feeling safe at work and not wanting to go back to work. These feelings quickly create a sense of worthlessness among employees, exacerbated by perceptions that management cannot help.

Providers have also found abuse becoming normalised among some employers and managers - even if not done deliberately - fostering beliefs among frontline workers that abuse and violence are simply the norm. 

In a recent case, a male retail employee received direct support after verbal and physical assaults. A dedicated support service de-escalated the situation, and provided the employee with a support plan, based on sessions with a psychologist and additional workplace support agreed with his line manager. At a check-in after two-weeks, the employee was in a better place and appreciated that he had needed some reassurance and acknowledged that he benefited from simply knowing that support was available to him.

Without a system for organising direct interventions, the retailer might have lost a valued and committed employee.

In other cases of violence towards frontline retail teams, employers have introduced empathetic, clinical-practice-based approaches into specialist employee training. This enables workers to learn to anticipate and then defuse challenging face-to-face situations, in-store or elsewhere at work.

Towards better wellbeing

Ensuring effective employee wellbeing systems is vital in the wake of escalating threats to the UK’s workforce. While national-level research is certainly sounding the alarm, the truly decisive wellbeing interventions for frontline employees will come from companies making a cultural shift to better understanding and better responses to and support of their valued team members under daily pressures and physical threats. 

Raechel Gavin is Chief People Officer at Sonder

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com