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<\/p>\nImagine one of your managers is dealing with a difficult employee, Jeff. Jeff was a great employee for a while, even employee of the month, but lately, there have been performance issues.<\/p>\n
A meeting is scheduled with Jeff, who shows up 20 minutes late with his usual \u201cI was stuck in traffic\u201d kind of excuses. Jeff has already been given verbal warnings about lateness, missed deadlines, errors, and hostile behaviour toward co-workers. However, he\u2019s also going through a divorce, custody issues, and financial problems. Your manager doesn\u2019t want to pile on more problems, but she\u2019s responsible for the department\u2019s bottom line. Unfortunately, she\u2019s going to have to write Jeff up.<\/p>\n
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When Jeff is told that he\u2019s getting a written warning, he gets hostile, agitated. Suddenly, Jeff and his manager are in each other\u2019s face. He accuses his manager of ignoring harassment and bullying by other employees who have it in for him. It\u2019s true; the manager has witnessed some demeaning comments about Jeff\u2019s ethnicity, rumours about his sexual orientation, and references to some snarky social media postings about him. But these comments and jokes didn\u2019t seem all that serious to her, plus they involved some of the company\u2019s top producers. She couldn\u2019t rock their boat.<\/p>\n
As the manager listens to Jeff, she tries to be sympathetic, but reminds Jeff that everyone has personal problems and these problems should be left at the door when you come to work. She suggests that everyone can use some \u201ctoughening up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeff gets very calm and says, \u201cYeah, don\u2019t worry about it then. I\u2019ll do what I need to do.\u201d The manager takes that as assurance.<\/p>\n
In the Workplace Training Network<\/a>\u2019s online Workplace Violence Prevention<\/a> course, available on The SafetyNET<\/a>, this exact scene plays out. What do you think? If you were to witness an interaction like this, would you think the manager handled things well? Would you say the manager has received effective training in how to handle the issues that arose? Are your employees equipped to handle situations like this?<\/p>\n An analysis of three important competencies in your employees can allow you to measure the effectiveness of your company\u2019s training on workplace violence:<\/p>\n Without these competencies, when workplace violence incidents occur, people often say they didn\u2019t see it coming. Upon further investigation, warning signs almost always emerge that those people missed, or chose to ignore. The problem is that, when employees lack training, people commonly think of workplace violence only as physical assault. According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), workplace violence is any act in which a person is abused, threatened, intimidated, or assaulted at work. Therefore, employees should be trained to be aware of:<\/p>\n When these warning signs are witnessed, most people don\u2019t need training to have their internal alarm systems go off. But, without training, obstacles to action may arise when those alarms sound, such as:<\/p>\n How many of these obstacles did you notice in the manager\u2019s interaction with Jeff? If the manager had received proper training, the scene would have looked a lot different. Now it\u2019s up to you to decide: if the same situation arose in your workplace, how would you want your managers to react?<\/p>\n \t\tKit Goldman is the president and founder of Workplace Training Network, Inc. The Workplace Training Network (WTN) offers unique, powerful \u201cedutainment\u201d style training on harassment, bullying, and workplace violence. For a full list of their courses, visit their website here<\/a>.\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine one of your managers is dealing with a difficult employee, Jeff. Jeff was a great employee for a while, even employee of the month, but lately, there have been performance issues…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1445],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
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