Episode 508: When Danger Enters the Workplace

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened. Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting HR topics and solve some of our listeners’ submitted questions.

Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off HR topic and talk about whatever I want to talk about. Think barbecue. Space exploration. Technology. Money. Managing. Business. Things that interest all of us.

Voice Over: We get a lot of emails with questions. Stay tuned for details on how you can submit yours to the show. And now let’s get started.

Paul: Hi, everybody. Welcome to today’s podcast. I’m joined today by Michelle Richards. Michelle, would you just tell everybody who’s listening what your role is at CEDR. What do you do?

Michelle: Absolutely. Well, my official title is Senior Solution Center advisor.

Paul: She’s like 97 years old.

Michelle: Yeah. [laughing]

Paul: So we had to put her in a wheelchair to get her in here.

Michelle: [laughing] You know, it kind of feels like that some days.

Paul: It sounded like you’re the senior…She’s not. She’s not. I’m a senior. You are not a senior, but she is a –

Michelle: It means I should know, especially what I’m talking about, because I’ve done this for a while.

Paul: You are a ranking, long term Solution Center HR expert here at CEDR and you have earned the senior title.

Michelle: I try, and we come up with solutions, right? So any day to day issues that a member, an employer is facing?

Paul: You’re in the trenches with them.

Michelle: Yep. We dig deep.

Paul: So let’s talk about trenches and digging deep today. Today’s subject matter is going to be a little bit sobering because we’re going to discuss what you need to do or know or plan for when it comes to some kind of a threat happening in your practice. This talk is a pretty good talk to listen to because it kind of runs the gambit, and when I say “it,” I mean how something presents itself. So you can have an outright threat, right?

Michelle: Right.

Paul: Like someone threatens to do harm. Michelle, I’m speaking to the 17 years we’ve been doing this, so I’ve gotten every kind of call and I’ll share some of those stories here in just a minute as we kind of go through what an office needs to know. It can be a domestic violence issue whereby someone in the practice is being threatened, one of your employees is being threatened, and that person comes to you, that employee comes to you and says, “I’m a little concerned that he may come here or she may come here.”

Michelle: Absolutely.

Paul: At least they’ve said that. It can be sexual harassment. I mean, I still feel that’s threatening, but I just want to make the point that kind of the same things are in place, especially with the sexual harassment part, is that you take it seriously and you just understand that you have to take steps if an employee alerts you to something like this.

Michelle: Absolutely. It’s when you’re dealing with the public also in any business.

Paul: If you guys are watching me on YouTube right now, you know that I’m like, shaking my head like she’s customers.

Michelle: Yeah. It’s a day to day reality, even if you’re in the best place and you typically feel safe. Anything can happen anywhere and we just want to be prepared.

Paul: Right, but at work as a manager or an owner, you have a responsibility to take action and I think in most cases, everybody wants to do something. It can be super scary. So, look, I’m going to share a story. This is something I was involved in about 15 years ago, and I was helping an office through something and the call came in. What it was was that a person who they had just hired had shared with another employee that they had passed some kind of a test and that test was that they had to shoot at the state capitol.

Michelle: Oh, boy.

Paul: They had to get within two miles of the state capital with a rifle, point a rifle at the state capitol and fire a gun at it.

Michelle: Oh, my gosh.

Paul: And then get back in their car and drive away.

Michelle: Wow.

Paul: Well, first of all, let’s talk about the judgment of a person who would even do that. I’ve never thought about putting that in the list of questions to our members. “Have you ever shot at the state capitol?”

Michelle: Right?

Paul: That’s not there. Then the lack of judgment here is that they shared it with someone at work. So these are big red flags for me, and I’m immediately going to take something seriously like this. The choices are many: call the police and tell them what the guy told you, all the way to the other is this is just a bunch of B.S. and let’s just ignore it. Seriously, it can run either way. In the end, this story ends with after talking to them, we were really concerned that this person was kind of off their rocker and what we decided to do was not to escalate it and to find a way to get them out of there as quickly as possible. They had only been with the practice for about three weeks, so our concern was if they were willing to do that, what would happen if we let them go? Even more to the point, what would happen if we turned them into the police and said that they said what they said. I’m leaning towards any time someone tells you that they’ve fired a rifle at a Capitol building, that you believe them on every single level and you do what is appropriate there. So what we did was we found a way to get them out of there: “Hey, we made a mistake. We thought we needed this position filled. We’re so sorry.” I know some people will cringe at this, but we even, to gloss things over, gave him an extra week of pay and said, “It’s not quite a fit and we just messed up here and we just wanted to let you know as soon as we knew.” So we created a facade and we kind of got him out of there.

Michelle: It sounds like it was a priority to make sure that the situation didn’t escalate. Putting aside, “Well, I don’t want to pay him because…” Put that aside. Let’s think about your employees and making sure we can get them out as smoothly as possible.

Paul: We just get them out as smoothly as possible, and then what we did is we waited because he wasn’t saying, “I’m going to gather with 20 of my friends and we’re going to do it again in a week.” That would have been a different story. We then waited and then the doctor went to the district attorney and told him what the situation was. I don’t know where it played out from there, but I imagine they took it seriously and they put somebody on him. That guy would have never connected the two.

Michelle: Right.

Paul: Right? They did their community duty. They did what they should do to help protect their community and still turn the guy in. I just want to share the story because it kind of gives you an idea of where you have some choices there.

Michelle: It’s doing their civic duty, first of all, and the second piece is they’re doing their due diligence as an employer to provide a safe working environment. That’s one of the takeaways that I think we want you to have today is, “What is your obligation as an employer that’s to provide a safe, harassment-free workplace?” If someone is threatening that, that harmony in your workplace and that safety, you need to do something about it. The question is what do you do? And that’s where you want to work with an outside party. You want to work with an expert to help see it from a fresh point of view, an outside point of view, who is not stressed by the immediate, just the closeness of the situation. Someone like us, we’re removed from it so we can kind of look at it from a lot of different angles.

Paul: I do want to say I get triggered by these things differently every time. So I don’t know how impartial I am on these things, but I get quite triggered. The other one that triggers me are domestic cases. The numbers on this, if you go into it, are not good. When I say the numbers are not good, what I’m referring to is that we really must take domestic violence threats seriously because when they go wrong, and they do go wrong often, they often involve a gun. Then there is irreparable harm when that sort of thing happens and there’s collateral damage in all sorts of things.So if someone’s working for you and they inform you that they’re having trouble with a spouse or any of those issues like that, Michelle, the next thing is, as we have a little bit of guidance here, there are these protocols that you can put in place. I would call them bare minimum, but I don’t know much more that you can do, but they involve things like secret code words that if it comes in over…I think my favorite one is the announcement. Someone gets on the mic or sends out an IM or something and says the pizzas are here.

Michelle: Yeah.

Paul: And on the other side of it, we did have an instance where the pizzas were actually there and it set off this kind of panic. [laughing]

Michelle: [laughing] Maybe don’t use anything that could actually happen.

Paul: She was new and she read it in the book, but she didn’t know and they had ordered pizza or somebody sent them to the office, and she’s like, “The pizzas are here.” And everyone’s like, “Oh, no!” Just spilling out the back of the practice.

Michelle: Domino’s is like, “Come on, I’m just delivering your order.”

Paul: Just left her with the pizza guy. So anyway, protocols are in place. Michelle, can you share just a few of the protocols? Like some things that you should just put in place? They’re in your employee handbook. They can be in your employee handbook, and just everybody kind of knows what to do.

Michelle: Absolutely. You know, to kind of simplify this, the first piece is to information gather. When we have employers call in, they’re often saying, “Hey, I care about this individual.” And to be clear, we’re talking about a potential domestic violence situation. The employee comes forward and the employer’s like, “What do I ask? I don’t want to cross a line. I don’t want to get too personal.” Well, let the employee share as much as they’re comfortable sharing, but gather as much information as you can regarding how it could directly impact your business as far as what do they need, as support, as an employee. Will it make them, and also you as an employer, feel more comfortable to have a code? So if that individual comes in, that employee can be removed if they’re front desk, right? They can go to the back, alert management, things like that. So those are the protocols that I believe you’re talking about, Paul, that we should have in place to anticipate something like that potentially happening.

Paul: And it’s okay to talk to your team about this, you know, briefly to fill them in that there’s a little bit of an issue because, the other thing that we put in the protocol is if any of you see him or her in the parking lot, you even see him drive by? You need to let us know immediately because we’re going to call the police.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I’ve done this before, before I came to CEDR. I love advising. Oh, believe me, it’s the best, but I used to engage with employees directly.

Paul: As an HR person.

Michelle: As an HR Director. Exactly. They come into my office, and we’d have a conversation. I used to have questions written out that were appropriate to ask but sometimes there’s a restraining order in place, sometimes they can provide a picture that we know what this individual looks like. Again, it depends on what they’re comfortable sharing, but it helps me to feel more prepared in the event that something did happen.

Paul: Michelle, I just want to say something pretty stark to everybody. Look, these restraining orders that are put on domestic partners are not worth the paper that they’re written on. They don’t stop bad people from doing bad things and this is why you kind of take these things, you know, don’t escalate it, don’t make it worse. Don’t freak everybody out, but you do take these things seriously. So first thing is to have your process for letting everybody know there might be a problem at the front desk, but it doesn’t always unfold that way. So a lot of times, we do get a lot of calls about the domestic violence issue or something else where we can kind of see it’s slowly unfolding in front of us. On the other side of this, I want to give two other examples. One of them is pretty simple. There’s just some kind of harassment. Comments. It’s usually sexual in nature. Somebody pats a butt while the hygienist is leaning over or somebody, a PA, is in the room with someone and someone makes an unwelcome comment. You have to take this very seriously and this is where you get into a little bit of investigation when someone says, “Hey, that guy just did this or that person just did that.” That is the investigation. “Hey, would you please tell me succinctly, just tell me what they said.” What you want to do is give them an opportunity to tell you what the problem is and kind of unpack it for you as they experienced it, because they need to be heard. It also gives you an opportunity to respond and do whatever you need to do. So do you need to tell the patient they’re fired? Do you just need to tell the patient, “Hey, it’s a little much. It’s a little much.” We get a call and someone’ll say, “Well, it’s the dad.” I keep using age. Maybe I shouldn’t use age, but I’m just telling stories as they happen.

Michelle: [laughing]

Paul: “He’s a little older and he doesn’t really have a good filter. We treat his entire family. It’s like these people, you know, they’ve got 16 kids, 45 grandkids. We’re treating everybody. They’re part of our practice. I don’t really want to fire him from the practice.” You may take your initial approach and say, “Well, we’re just going to talk to him and the doctor’s going to call him and say, ‘Hey, man, you got to cool your jets on this.’” But you have to share that with the employee and you have to know that the employee agrees with you. If she’s like, “No, he touched me. It was completely inappropriate. He pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go.” Then you’re going to have to solve this problem in a different way. I’m not going to go all the way down that rabbit hole, but that’s an example of something that happens often and it still falls into this kind of protocol thing where you’ve got to do something because someone from outside of the practice has done something. A vendor’s coming through and being inappropriate and one of your employees complains about comments that he or she is making. All these things fall into that.

Paul: Then the last one that I want to cover in this is that threats are communicated and this is happening more and more. It’s very common. We see it as one thing, but it sure comes down the pipe in different formats. It’s everything from a veiled threat to an outright threat. Somewhere in the conversation, guns are mentioned, shooting up the place is mentioned. You guys, I’m telling you, you’d be surprised how often this happens.

Michelle: “I’m going to wait for you in the parking lot.”

Paul: “I’m going to wait for you in the parking lot.” “My husband’s not going to be happy with this. He’s going to teach you all a lesson.” In these instances, as a manager employer, I think you know that you have to take them quite seriously and you have to address this pretty quickly. I think this goes all the way back to my first story where the guy was saying he was shooting. We didn’t want to escalate.

Michelle: Right.

Paul: You don’t want to escalate with this person either. It’s not their job to confront, right, Michelle? It’s not your job to take him down.

Michelle: No, it’s not. Just try to not escalate it further and then contact someone who can help support you. Investigate, take whatever steps you need to take, and what I wanted to make sure I mention is from the HR perspective and documentation perspective, you still have a duty here. So at the end of everything, when the dust has finally settled and you’ve taken steps, we might recommend in certain situations that you issue some kind of update to your employees.

Paul: Communicate back to them.

Michelle: That could be in a meeting, it could be in a letter. It depends on the situation, and that’s what we’re here to help with, but that is a good idea. Just to demonstrate that you took it seriously, you took some steps and that’s your obligation there.

Paul: So, you know, something to the effect of, “You all know what occurred last week. We’ve spoken with Mr. Smith. We’ve sent him a letter. We’ve released him as a patient. We’ve let him know that his conversation wasn’t appropriate.” (For listeners, if he threatened the practice) “We called the police department, let them know. We (again, maybe) issued a restraining order. We’ve gone through these things.” And then you dovetail in your other stuff: “Because he threatened us and we take this seriously, if anybody sees him in the parking lot or anywhere around or you’re out in the community and he says something to you, you need to report it to us immediately so that we can take additional steps.”

Michelle: Right. That’s etiquette.

Paul: They’ve crossed a line whereby you can let them go, but you may still, when you send the letter, say, “We can’t treat you anymore, but we suggest…” and then pick your competitor that you don’t like and give them their name and…

Michelle: [laughing]

Paul: No, no, wait a minute. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. I was just kidding. I was just kidding. I’m kidding, y’all. I’m not kidding. I’m kidding.

Michelle: [laughing] You’ll never know…

Paul: You may tell them, “You can go to an emergency room or you can seek someone else.” And go through that. This is a…I hate to say it from the very beginning, we had these instances occur. This is one of the things that never stopped. It just keeps getting worse. We’re getting more and more of these things. I do want to go back and remind you, 99.9% of the time, nothing comes of it, but that doesn’t matter. You still need to take the interim steps in the middle to assure your employees that they won’t be harassed at work. They won’t be threatened at work, and that when it does happen, that you collect their side of the story and what’s going on, you do some investigation, you take some proactive steps and you have a few protocols in place in case something goes wrong up front or in the practice.

Michelle: There you go.

Paul: Yeah, that’s it, right?

Michelle: That’s it. Complicated, stressful situation and break down some steps.

Paul: Yeah, uncomplicate it the best you can. And then take the appropriate steps based off of judgment and all those other things. Like you said, Michelle, we deal with this all the time. So if you’ve got a HR trusted person or you’re a member of ours, you just reach out to us and we’ll help you with that stuff.

Michelle: Sure will.

Paul: Okay. Thank you. Not a not a fun subject. A little bit HR heavy.

Michelle: A necessary evil.

Paul: Yeah. So What The Hell Just Happened in HR is you had a problem in your practice, you have to take a proactive step against a patient or somebody from the outside that is abusing your team in one way or another.

Michelle: Thank you, Paul.

Paul: Bye.

Voice Over: Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode of What the Hell Just Happened. If you have an HR issue, question, or just want to add a comment about something Paul said, record it on your phone and send it to podcast@wthjusthappened.com. We might even ask if we can play it on the show. Don’t forget to Like and Subscribe and join us again next week.