Introduction
When employee’s services are no longer required, the security of the manager, staff and entire company must be given paramount consideration. Termination triggers violence more so when a company has retrogressive policies and procedures for sending off workers.
Employee’s emotions may escalate to full violence seriously injuring or killing colleagues. When they can’t deal with defeat, they may commit suicide or homicide. Company’s work structure may not tolerate violence resulting into ongoing conflict but, when termination comes, the employees will portray unsatisfactory and hostile behaviors. This may be offensive, overbearing, assaulting and threatening to the manager and other staff. It’s suicidal to hire people being infatuated with weapons as they may carry them to their working area and subsequently use them when they feel insecure.
Employees who have been working under pressure may be counter productive when are being terminated. They may incite other workers or try to bring loss to the company. If the company has no crisis management structures (e.g. hotline for alert when there is impending threat for violence) it will be fire you before you fire me situation. The manager may have hired job applicants without thorough screening hiding their records not evening calling their previous employers to ascertain their productivity or socio-criminological characters.
The articulated set of procedures will not be binding to curb work place violence when termination comes. It will be disastrous should violence occur causing great loss to the company and more so when there is no insurance cover. An unjust and inconsistent policy for terminations may cause dispute between staff and management.
During termination there need be open communication, support and clear guidelines for
terminations. Managers shouldn’t undermine workers. Ongoing conflict between workers, warning signs of violence should be addressed whenever they occur. The manager should have diverse knowledge in threat analysis and incident management, nurture culture of respect and co-habitation. Workers with symptoms of illegal drug and alcohol addiction should be referred to comprehensive programmes to prevent violence at work.
References
IRMI.com (October 2004), Deadly Terminations “and How To Avoid them” retrieved from (http://www.irmi.com/expert/articles/2004/madero10.aspx)
The free Library (April, 1, 1995) Death in the office: “workplace homicides “retrieved from (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Death+in+the+office%3a+workplace+homicides.-a016921447)
