Essay Example on Workplace Violence: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Enhance Safety

Introduction

Workplace violence refers to threats, acts of violence or any unnatural behavior that may raise security concerns or threats to health and physical safety of employees and other people in an organization (International Institute, & ASIS International and the Society for Human Resource Management, 2011). A multidisciplinary approach is a strategy involving the participation of several key stakeholders in an organization such as the management, legal team, human resource personnel, and security team, which is employed to prevent workplace violence. The management ensures that enough resources are allocated to the workplace violence prevention program, while the human resource personnel implements the strategies for the program. The security team ensures safety within the organization, and the legal team helps the organization to comply with legal responsibilities relating to workplace violence prevention. Other key stakeholders in the program are health personnel, who treat people in case of injuries or illness.

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When planning such a strategy, the first step would be conducting a needs evaluation to identify how vulnerable the organization is to violence, the existing ways of prevention and readiness to counter workplace violence. In an organization planning to implement a workplace violence prevention program, a group should be selected to design and come up with a plan for the actual implementation of the program. The organization should then choose a Threat Management Team to handle any cases of violence prevention policy violation and offer thorough training for the team, and finally come up with a protocol for incident management. The organization should also implement additional strategies and protocols if need be, to strengthen the existing ones and, regularly examine the effectiveness of the program.

The critical elements of an effective workplace violence prevention program are a prevention policy, a well-trained Threat Management Team, teamwork with external experts and a pre-determined incident management procedure. Other elements include protocols to follow when addressing emergencies or incidents causing tension, adequate training for the employees and specific strategies when dealing with areas under higher risks of workplace violence.

Physical and IT Security Convergence: The Basics

Convergence refers to a situation where security functions that were formerly disjointed officially work together towards achieving a common goal. It is beneficial to organizations because it leads to increased sharing of information among security functions which in turn promotes teamwork, as well as help organizations to outline an exhaustive security strategy which puts security goals together with the corporation's goals (Slater, 2005). For most Fortune, 1000 companies such as Apple Inc., both physical and data security is prime, to keep them on top of the charts in the current competitive environment. Therefore, these corporations need security convergence because blended network attacks and threats might have to be countered by a combination of responses, both physical and electronic. Security convergence also leads to the creation of stronger security systems with a single chief security officer (CSO) controlling all the security operations. Convergence also increases sharing of information which improves communication and efficiency in decision making, and also allows different security teams to work team (Slater, 2005).

Convergence faces challenges, most of which arise from corporate security personnel and IT professionals coming from different cultural and professional background differences, with a gap in training. The other challenge is IT professionals are paid higher than their corporate security counterparts, which might cause hostility in the working environment and loss of motivated teamwork (Rahman & Donahue, 2010). However, I believe security convergence should be upheld because time can efficiently resolve these issues and with negotiations, salary gaps can be narrowed.

References

International, A., Institute, A. N., & ASIS International and the Society for Human Resource

Management. (2011,). Workplace Violence and Response Guideline. Retrieved from https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/nabenet.site-ym.com/resources/collection/287C1A6D-C2D6-4E8F-8514-27F9B7FC3CAE/wvpi_std.pdf

Rahman, M., & Donahue, S. E. (2010). Convergence of corporate and information security. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1002.1950.

Slater, D. (2005). Physical and IT Security Convergence: The Basics. Retrieved from https://www.csoonline.com/article/2117824/physical-and-it-security-convergence-the-basics.html