What Are You Doing About Workplace Violence Prevention?

Workplace violence prevention requires an inclusive culture of safety.

At CPI, we’ve shared perspectives about the importance of cultures of safety and caring in a variety of workplaces—from health care to human services to schools. The term “culture of safety” has important and specific meanings in certain fields—for example, in health care, a “culture of safety” is largely associated with clinical outcomes.

Our job at the Crisis Prevention Institute is to help organizations expand the unique definitions of a “culture of safety” to include all people, in all kinds of working environments—our vision supports the specific goals of your industry.

When we think about the type of world we would all like to live in, we think about common values that tie us together as human beings. At CPI, we’ve identified these values as Care, Welfare, Safety, and Security^℠, and we embed them in our culture by training people to respond proactively and safely to challenges and crises.

You can prevent the incidents that fuel aggression and violence by learning how your own behaviors can accelerate or defuse conflict. Through training, you can learn supportive behaviors that empower individuals instead of suppressing them, and with CPI’s process of certifying staff to instruct their own colleagues on-site in these techniques, organizations like yours can evolve their internal cultures to support the best possible outcomes for the patients, clients, or students that they serve.

Training is the best way to ensure a collaborative and sustainable culture of safety.

Why is a culture of safety so important to effective violence prevention and safe crisis intervention? Because “violence” isn’t one type of behavior—it’s a range of them. We view violence as anything that might register across this continuum of behavior:

• Discourtesy
• Disrespect
• Intimidation
• Harassment/bullying
• Retaliation
• Verbal Assault
• Physical assault

For nearly 40 years, CPI has worked to advance the principles of safety and caring through a nonviolent approach—and we do it through collaboration. We collaborate with certified instructors in workplaces all over the world, who in turn collaborate with the internal staff and clients that they support, to make sure that the values of violence prevention stay consistent across populations and over time.

It starts with the design of our institute, extends to the team of global trainers who take our methodology out to all kinds of professionals, and culminates with these professionals teaching these strategies to their peers, and modeling them to the populations that they serve—all by embracing and implementing a culture of proactive workplace violence prevention.

There’s no denying that this moment in our society is particularly fraught. The rapid development of new media, tumultuous political events, and distressing acts of violence have all fueled a cacophony that is hard to decipher. It can feel challenging to see the way forward.

So, in moments when it feels like we can’t agree on anything, it’s more vital than ever to identify what we can agree on:

• We can agree that all people deserve safety and caring.
• We can agree that all people have the potential to experience or be witness to the disruptive and challenging behaviors that can fuel crisis and distress.
• We can agree that a global commitment to the care and welfare of all people is the only thing that will sustain safety and security for all people.

These universal values merit an equally universal, and accessible, solution. If we change ourselves through training to be more attuned to proactively addressing the risks, we elevate our culture to be one that is safer and more caring for all people.

Safer workplaces support safer communities—and ultimately, a safer world.

Workplaces are the perfect place to advance an inclusive culture of violence prevention, safety, and caring. They’re critical hubs where many otherwise divergent populations interact—professionals and the individuals they care for, vendors and consumers, organizational leadership and staff.

Because we spend so much time at work, the mentalities driving our conduct in professional environments are often the same as those we employ in our personal and social lives. Driving positive culture change in the workplace is a positive and constructive behavior that benefits not only ourselves, but the world around us.

Workplace violence prevention starts with establishing cultures of caring and safety—CPI training will help you shift your paradigm so that those universal values of Care, Welfare, Safety, and Security^℠ become instincts that you can trust and rely on to proactively address the continuum of violence in your workplace.

Ready to learn what you can do to promote a culture of safety and caring in your workplace? These articles will take you deeper:

• Workplace Civility and a Culture of Safety Go Hand in Hand
• The Case for a Culture of Caring in Schools
• What Is #CWSS and How Can It Help You at Work?

You can also see the outcomes of a strategic implementation of Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® training in a range of workplaces. Check out our results—you’ll be able to filter by field to get a firsthand perspective on the measurable benefits to staff, organizations, and the individuals they serve.

And once you’re ready to commit to a culture of safety and caring in your workplace—it’s time to sign up for training.