Avoiding Employee Violence This Holiday Season

The National Retail Federation just released their guidelines to help retail management prepare for an inevitable increase in mall shootings that spike during the holiday season. While I know that this is a tragic reality these days, I truly believe that any retailer involved in a violent crime would say, “Yes, now I see that there were early signs that this employee’s behavior had changed in a negative way.”

Very rarely does a person wake up one day and say, “I am going to go shoot up the mall (or) my workplace.” Yet often it is the final act of a person who has hit the wall in desperation.

As I wrote in a recent blog post on a serious related crime –employee theft (albeit with less finality) — “The impact of hard economic times on employees can translate into workplace theft, drugs, and even violence.”

It is critical that retail managers identify early signs of concern — unusual actions, changes in behavior, breaking of procedures while monitoring cash access points, and inventory of products, etc.

While not all violence starts with these early actions, many stem from the same core problems — issues related to unemployment in the household, personal financial crisis, depression, drug abuse, etc.

These real life issues cause stress, which can often turn to acts of desperation whether it is employee theft or those final devastating acts we have been reading about in the news lately. Employers are seen as a catalyst to the problems and often the employee rationalizes aggressive actions against their employer — when in fact their problems stem from deeper personal issues.

Employers should carefully monitor employee day-to-day performance around key performance indicators:

Monitoring, using these key indicators, will allow the observant employer to potentially recognize early signs of concern and changes in behavior. In many cases detection of early warning signs can avoid aggressive violence.

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