Employee Handbook - Looking Out for Workplace Violence

Awareness Turns to Paranoia in America's Large Companies

The Virginia Tech shooting tragedy has once again raised America's and the world's awareness of possibly unstable individuals in school and in the workplace. The grim reality is that any one person could snap at any given time and businesses are not going to hire psychologists to sit on premises and assess all employees from CEO to janitor. However, following the VA Tech episode many companies have circulated lookout guidelines, hoping to catch a shooter before he or she goes too far.

In our time, awareness often turns into excessive madness as the line between healthy apprehension or alertness and paranoia is too often blurred. To Illustrate this point, I will bring some information from a recently updated Employee Handbook. The respectable company shall remain unnamed for obvious reasons...(notes under bold points are mine).

[...]if you observe or witness any of these early warning signals or other unusual behavior, you should immediately notify your supervisor or other manager and provide the details. Commonly mentioned warning signals include the following:

1. Direct or veiled verbal or physical threats of harm.
Repeat incidents may be cause for concern, but a lot depends on the tone in which the threats are delivered. An overly sensitive coworker might denounce someone for having playfully said he will kill him or wring his neck. My advise is as following: since you are going out of your way to write workplace guidelines, why not make them more specific, such as: If 'team member' spends his day hissing under his breath, covertly glancing at coworkers and murmuring 'Your time is near...infidels will die...death to the bourgeois...I was a latchkey child' alert your local HR office or supervisor.

2. Intimidation of others.
Again, this is too generic.

3. Carrying a concealed weapon.
I envision Comedy Central-like situations with the entire security staff surrounding an armed and dangerous employee and summoning the SWAT team only to discover that the harmful item under his suit jacket is a Treo 600 PDA.