Along with OSHA compliance and the protection of your employees, another reason to have a viable violence prevention program is to help insulate your company from charges of negligence. Although it is certainly difficult to develop policies and training programs that can anticipate every method and manner by which your company and employees could face an attack, failing to analyze your risks and incorporate reasonable security measures in this day and age is unconscionable and can cause someone to bring a claim against your for one or more of the following:

What Accent Signage’s management should have known or did know and what they should have done or failed to do came into question shortly after the incident when a lawsuit was filed by the families of the victims. They charged Accent with negligence as the family’s attorney stated that the shootings were “reasonably foreseeable based on Engeldinger’s past incidents of employment misconduct and his known propensity for abuse and misconduct.”[2] The company’s legal team attempted to have the suite dismissed by the court, but on June 2, 2013, a district court judge ruled that the families of the victims could proceed with two negligence counts against Accent Signage because the company did not have policies or training programs for their employees that would mitigate violence nor did they train them on how to survive a violent incident. This ruling was basically aligned with OSHA’s guidelines set forth in OSHA’s General Duty Clause, which mandates that employers must train their employees on violence prevention and put reasonable safeguards in place.

This ruling squarely puts the blame and legal liability on companies who have done nothing to address the possibility of violent incidents in their workplace. It is clear that violence prevention plans must be addressed in every company’s policies and training programs. The lawsuit against Accent was eventually resolved in a confidential settlement arrangement.

The first cost that the business will incur after the incident will be counseling services for their employees. Because the shooting occurred on the first shift, the entire shift of 125 employees will need to be debriefed and assessed on site by a qualified crisis counseling service:

125 employees × $250 for an on-site assessment = $31,250

We can also assume that some employees from the second shift will experience emotional trauma from the event so we will add another 15 employees who need on-site counseling:

15 employees × $250 for an on-site assessment = $3,750

(Although we are calling it an on-site assessment, it will not actually take place at the business but in conference rooms within nearby hotels.) While many of the employees will not require any further counseling, some certainly will. For this we will assume that 20 people require some on-going counseling, so we will figure those 20 employees will have 12 office visits (rather than on-site counseling) at a rate of $150 per hour amounting to $36,000. Of those 20 employees, perhaps 5 of them will be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which could cause $30,000 in ongoing worker’s compensation claims for the next year. Once your building reopens, it is a good idea to have two counselors on site for all shifts during the first two days:

2 counselors × 16 hours a day × 2 days = $8,000.

The next drain on revenue and profit in the post incident period will be lost productivity. Here’s what can be expected:

Another lost productivity factor is the focus that will be taken off the business in order to prepare for the inevitable lawsuit(s) that will follow. Staff time will be spent retrieving and copying documents for your legal team. Executives and other staff members will spend time being interviewed by your attorneys, being prepped for deposition, and giving their depositions. Even if the suit is settled out of court, significant time will be spent getting to that point.

Next comes the cost of cleanup, repairs, and remodeling. As mentioned earlier, your employees should not be involved in these processes. The remaining crime scene will contain blood residue, which is considered hazardous material, therefore a proper hazmat cleanup team will be required. It is important to note that frequently, the shooter does not commit suicide in the same part of the facility where the shooter killed his or her intended target, so you may be dealing with two crime scenes within your building. In addition to the hazmat cleaning of standing blood, carpeted areas drenched with blood will need to be replaced. Blood spatters on chairs, desks, equipment, ceiling walls, and wall coverings will need to be professionally assessed to determine if they can be cleaned or should be replaced. It may also be necessary to remodel the area where the homicides took place. If the victim was shot at his or her cubicle, no one will ever want to be assigned to that space or use that computer again. If the shooting took place in the employee lunchroom, you will need to remodel that portion of the building, build out a new lunchroom, and completely re-do the space where the old lunchroom was. Assuming that no major remodeling is required, you can expect to spend $5,000 to $15,000 on two moderately small crime scene cleanup renovations. For our purposes we will use the middle of the road figure of $10,000.

We are now at the point where it is prudent to consider the cost of the lawsuit. Most lawsuits related to workplace violence are settled out of court and as such, the ultimate costs to the employer are not revealed. However, on December 3, 1993, $4.25 million was awarded to a postal employee shot by a coworker in Dearborn, Michigan. The award is higher than those of which we are aware and the fact that the employee was awarded this money is an indication that an out-of-court settlement could not be reached and the case went to court.

A good place to start in our model is to figure the salary that the victim would have earned had he worked through age 65. As we mentioned in our hypothetical assumptions, our victim was 35 years of age making $40,000 per year. Therefore, assuming he would have worked another 30 years at the same wage, the lost income to his survivors would be $1.2 million with approximately $500,000 spent in legal services for a total lawsuit cost of $1.7 million.

The plaintiff’s counsel will always ask for more damages for such things as emotional distress, cost of counseling for his or her family, and so forth. Additionally the family may be able to negotiate or be awarded more money if they can make the case that the business was particularly negligent. Two of the most common factors that can be used to increase the settlement or award are (1) the lack of a violence prevention plan and (2) foreseeability, meaning that the business knew or should have known that the aggressor’s behavior would ultimately escalate into an act of violence.

For our purposes, we will assume that these additional factors were dropped as part of the out-of-court negotiation and that your company’s total damages and cost remain at $1.7 million. However if more than one employee was killed or seriously injured, you could expect a significantly higher settlement. There may also be lawsuits from employees who feel that you needlessly exposed them to danger because of a lack of preparedness.

The next cost to the business will be turnover. Not all of your employees are going to come back to work. The combined cost of recruiting and training a new employee in nontechnical businesses is considered to be approximately $2500. If the person is in information technology, an executive, or a licensed professional (doctor or pharmacist), the cost of replacement may rise beyond $25,000. For our example, we will assume that 10% of the employees (20 people total) do not want to return. We will further assume that 15 of them are staff members and 5 of them are executives. Their cost of replacement will be $155,000.

At this point, the total cost of the one-workplace homicide/suicide is $2,574,000. As bad as this number is, there are still other incremental costs that could be looming, much to the detriment of your business. These are basically business partners that are unsure about continuing to do business with you unless you are a very large resilient company.

Now let’s see how the cost of the violent incident affected the company’s profitability. The yearly projected profit for the year (10% of $600,000/week × 52 weeks) is $3,120,000. The total incident cost of $2,574,000 negates 83% of our model company’s profit for the year.

As we conclude this chapter, we hope you realize that, as we mentioned earlier, we took a very conservative approach in looking at the costs of having an on-site homicide and suicide. Depending on the size of your company and the other factors just mentioned, your costs could be somewhat below the $2,574,000 provided by our model or they could be significantly higher. An interesting exercise that we recommend would be to use our model and plug in the numbers that would be applicable to your business. Between what we have provided you in Chapters 1 and 2, you should have enough information to convince any function in your company that you need a violence prevention plan.