Is My Business at Risk of Workplace Violence?

Key Takeaways

• By the end of this you’ll be able to name which working conditions are live in your own business, and how many staff-hours a week sit inside them.
• You’ll know which of those conditions holds most of your exposure, which is a more useful thing to know than whether you have any.
• You’ll have a number you can hold against your own business next quarter, which is the only comparison a business your size is ever going to get.

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Is my business at risk of workplace violence is a question about comparison. You want to know where you sit against businesses like yours, and that comparison has never been published at your size. The question is still answerable. You just answer it from your own schedule.

What actually puts a business at risk of workplace violence?

Five working conditions do most of it, and they cut across industries rather than following them. Two jobs with nothing else in common can carry similar exposure, because the same handful of things are true about the room the worker is standing in.

Read the federal numbers by occupation instead of by sector and this gets visible fast. Bartenders experienced 70.9 nonfatal workplace violence victimizations per 1,000 workers, against 8.0 for workers overall. That comes from Indicators of Workplace Violence, 2019, published jointly by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and NIOSH. Divide the two and bartending runs close to nine times the rate of everybody else.

Gas station attendants came in at 59.4 in the same survey. Hospitality and fuel retail are separate industries with separate regulators, separate insurance, separate everything. What those two jobs share is a counter, money, hours when the place is thin, and one person facing whoever walks in.

The condition is the useful unit. Here are the five worth checking:

Condition	What it looks like on an ordinary shift	Why it carries exposure
One person facing the public	A single staff member covering the floor, the desk, or the room	Nobody can step in, and nobody can corroborate
Money or medication on site	A register, a drawer, a safe, a stock cabinet	Gives a stranger a reason to be there
Impairment or distress in the room	Alcohol served, a waiting room, a billing dispute, bad news	Raises the odds that a routine interaction turns
Thin hours	Opening, closing, overnight, the gap between shifts	Fewer people in the building, slower help
Staff who can’t end the situation	Anyone who has to keep serving, treating, or de-escalating	The person most exposed has the least room to walk away

Nobody has published a scored instrument for this at small-business size, so the five above are a working list and nothing more. What they give you is something specific to look for, which beats looking for a feeling.

One test sits underneath all five rows. Look for the stretches in your schedule where a customer and one staff member are the only two people who know what’s happening in the room. Anything built on the assumption that somebody else is watching has already missed that room.

Which of my staff are most exposed?

The ones with the least room to leave the situation or object to it. That’s a fact about position rather than about personality, and it holds in every kind of business.

Risk concentrates where voice is weakest. Paid by the hour. Newer, younger, or working in a second language. The staff member who can’t afford to lose the shift is the one who stays in the room a few minutes longer than they should. People go back into situations that frighten them because they need the job and the rent is due.

That costs them first and you second. They absorb it quietly, they stop volunteering for the shift, and eventually they leave without ever telling you why, which reaches you looking like a hiring problem.

The pattern is structural. The same imbalance produces the same behavior wherever it exists, which is why it shows up in a clinic, a hotel and a hardware store in roughly the same shape.

Customer-facing work carries more than its share. Retail sales workers absorbed 17% of the nonfatal workplace violence against private-sector workers in that 2019 survey. They’re 9% of the private-sector workforce. Close to double their share, for work most owners think of as ordinary.

One caution about all of these figures. They come from a single report, with no second study sitting behind them corroborating the picture. Read them as the best available description rather than as settled measurement.

When does workplace violence actually happen?

Mostly while you’re open and busy, which is the opposite of what most owners inspect for. The afternoon carries the largest share of it, at 39%, in that same survey.

That one is worth sitting with. The instinct is to check the edges of the day. Owners walk the building at closing, they think about the person locking up, and they rarely think about two in the afternoon with a full waiting room.

The thin hours still matter, for a different reason. Evening, 6pm to midnight, accounted for 18% of it. Overnight accounted for 9%. Those hours carry less of the volume and far less of the help, so something that goes wrong at 11pm runs longer before anyone reaches it.

Longer means something concrete. It means the person handles it alone, decides alone whether it’s serious, and finishes the shift before anyone with authority hears about it. The cost of a thin hour is measured in how long somebody is on their own with it, not in how often something happens there.

So both facts belong in your read. Volume sits in the busy hours. Exposure per hour worked sits at the edges. Check the middle of the day for how much of it there is, and check the edges for what happens when something goes wrong.

How do I turn this into a read on my own business?

Count. Take one ordinary week from the schedule already on your desk and put hours against conditions. It’s about twenty minutes of work, and you don’t need anything you don’t already have.

1. Pick a normal week. Skip the holiday week and the week somebody was out sick. Take one that looks like most weeks.
2. Go shift by shift and mark which conditions were live. Use the five from the table. A shift can carry three at once, and most do.
3. Total the hours by condition. How many staff-hours had one person alone with the public. How many had cash on site during a thin hour. Write the numbers down.
4. Rank them. The condition holding the most hours is where your exposure actually concentrates.

Then read your own number, because there’s no table to look it up in. A twelve-person shop that finds six staff-hours a week of lone working has a specific, solvable shape to it. The same shop finding sixty has built lone working into how it runs, and that’s a different conversation with itself. The number is big when it’s most of your week, and you’re the only person who knows which one you got.

What the count gives you is a description of your business rather than a prediction. It tells you where the hours are. Nothing available at this size honestly tells you when something will happen.

Then keep it. Run the same count next quarter. If your alone-hours number moved because you changed how you staff Tuesday afternoons, you’ll see it, and you’ll have the only benchmark that was ever going to be available to a business your size.

What to do about the ranking is its own decision, and there’s more to it than buying something.

You started this wanting to know how you compare. You compare to yourself, measured twice, and the first measurement takes twenty minutes. Everything else you were waiting for was somebody else’s data about somebody else’s business, and it was never going to arrive with your name on it. Whether your business is at risk of workplace violence turns out to be a question you can answer, once you stop asking it about businesses in general.

Whatever you eventually look at, put one question to it first: does this work in the room where nobody can see the person? That’s the condition every row in the table keeps pointing back to, and it’s the one most things sold to you quietly assume away.

References

• Indicators of Workplace Violence, 2019. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics and NIOSH (NCJ 250748).