More Lessons Learned: Deeper Insights from the First 8 Weeks of SB 553

Risk Resiliency has continued to work with our clients on solving their biggest issues and challenges related to the SB 553 legislation and integrating the new requirements with existing or outdated WPV programs. I was chatting with my colleague Jonathan Reeves about the challenges he and I have faced with the last few WPV programs. He indicated that I should add several more critical items that he thought required sharing with our network and contacts. If you haven’t had the chance to review his insights, you can find them here. I hope that these help you and your program implementation. Please feel free to reach out to us if you need more information or support. 

SB 553 Lessons Learned:

Reporting and Tracking of WPV Incidents

Often, events of workplace violence are captured by two departments – human resources and security.  The challenge is that these two systems store different viewpoints, investigations, and rarely are cross connected. This leads to inaccurate reporting numbers of WPV events, inconsistent investigations, or a completely missed response. There must be time taken to find common ground between the siloed departments that will create a willingness and mechanism to share information. The final step will be to identify how the reporting and tracking of PII (Personal Identifying Information) information will be shared confidentially so that it meets the needs of all the stakeholders.

Collaboration

It’s common for companies who experience Workplace Violence to handle the event in a departmental silo. All too often the information needed to successfully resolve the incident is kept private without involving a multidisciplinary team for review. This type of information hoarding prevents the company from notifying other employees of a potential threat, conducting a welfare check on any victims, or putting safeguards up to prevent similar incidents from occurring. At Risk Resiliency, we help our clients understand the requirements of the SB-553 Bill and break down those departmental silos to work as a collaborative Threat Assessment Team.

Tracking Training for Employees

Once the learning and development team has created a comprehensive training module for employees with the company’s policy and plan to prevent and mitigate WPV, it’s important to document when each employee completes the training. An accurate log with specific details is required. This can be kept as one document if done in a group setting or recorded in the employee’s electronic training history. Track progress of completion and set deadlines. Holding the entire team accountable to the company’s stance is a critical step.

Follow Through Actions After an Incident

Once the incident has occurred, the immediate response is over, and recovery is taking place. This is the time that the employer needs to review the existing program and ask themselves a few questions. 

• Did our current program consider this incident type within its procedures? If you answered no, then you will need to update the procedures and maybe even the WPV policy to reflect the newly identified information. Failure to do so may trigger a failure to mitigate notice down the road. 
• Once you’re After Actions Review is complete you will need to track who was assigned the action arising from the lesson learned, when it is due for implementation, and clearly understand what success looks like. In a nutshell you will need a Program Management Plan for your WPV program.

Be sure to check out our other post on California Bill SB 553 and program offerings on Workplace Violence Prevention for more insights and resources to help guide your organization toward compliance.

Bryan Green

Senior Consultant

Bryan Green is a seasoned business operations and financial leader with focused experience in healthcare management roles supporting security operations.