Is Your Company Culture Inhibiting Effective Workplace Safety Training?

Organizations and workforces regularly clash over the meaning of quality training as it relates to workplace security.

Employers often do not understand workplace violence prevention strategies, and that lack of understanding turns into a lack of support. Managers’ disinterest unintentionally sabotages their commitment to workplace safety training, and their lackluster commitment results in employees believing that management does not care about their safety.

One out of seven Americans did not feel safe at work in 2019, according to a Society for Human Resources Managers (SHRM) survey. After the COVID-19 pandemic, workers’ perceptions of safety has gotten more tenuous. A 2023 survey from Verkada found that 58 percent of frontline workers feel the threat of physical harm at work is on the rise. Only 37 percent of workers reported feeling safe at their workplace.

This perception isn’t insurmountable. Through training and culture, organizations can help inform and empower employees to stay alert for hazards and respond appropriately. 

It would be disastrous—but hardly unheard of—for a security concern to go unresolved because of a corporate culture that failed to invest in understanding mutual responsibility and professional training.

In September 2012, Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, Minnesota, fired one of its employees. That individual went on to kill six people in the workplace and then himself. In 2013, a district judge allowed a victim’s family to sue the company, claiming Accent was negligent for employing the shooter for years despite prior negative conduct. The claim was based on General Duty Clause guidelines set by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which require employers train and provide reasonable safeguards to protect employees. The company later settled the suit.

More recently, a Rhode Island hospital nurse sued the hospital’s security firm in 2024 after he was attacked by a psychiatric patient. The nurse accused contract security officers of negligence for failing to prevent the assault and delaying intervention.

Cases like these place responsibility on the employer to train employees to recognize indicators of potential workplace violence and to respond appropriately.

Despite recent litigation and longstanding workplace hazard guidelines, senior management may not view workplace violence as a critical concern—especially if there has not been a prior incident. Similarly, employees might resist security training that feels too generic, disruptive, or unrelated to their daily lives. Employers might also selectively train and skip content covering all four OSHA categories of workplace violence (Type I: criminal interest; Type II: customer/client; Type III: worker on worker; and Type IV: personal relationship). These gaps can leave workers open to risk.

For example, a salesperson who does not know how to assess, evaluate, and mitigate risk might expose him or herself to robbery, assault, or theft. Field inspectors whose training was inadequate will not know how to engage a disgruntled customer or how to de-escalate the situation. A social worker performing a home visit might find him or herself in the middle of a domestic violence situation and not know how to safely leave the environment.

Training gaps are the result of a failure to communicate as part of the organizational culture. Education and information can influence organizational culture, just as company culture can influence the value of effective training outcomes. But misaligned and miscommunicated cultural priorities lead to confusion and resistance at work.

Where Culture Derails Training

Poor design, weak content, the choice of delivery method, and the selection of trainer can adversely impact understanding, application, execution, and sincerity. This results in boring content, repeat messaging, and the use of counterproductive training mediums.

Counterproductive training surfaces when senior managers fail to allocate appropriate time, resources, and consideration for employee involvement or contributions that might be worksite and workforce specific. Ineffective training schedules do not allow the time needed for scenario-based discussions. Mixing audiences into general, broad sessions compromises quality by not considering specific risk factors that relate to different groups. This can result in boiling down guidance to the lowest common denominator or overloading the audience with training that does not apply to them.

In addition, trainers may assume that employees already know the material—especially when instructing non-security personnel about security basics—so they breeze through it. Time constraints limit discussion and in-depth understanding.

By mandating this sort of ineffective training, the company culture conveys a lack of credibility, trust, and confidence in worker safety and security by diminishing the attention paid to it.

A culture that lacks management commitment to safety training results in workers’ belief that the organization is not focused on educating and informing to minimize risks but rather on checking the box on compliance. Employees leave these sessions feeling that the training is not employee-centered or designed for the worksite specific threats and risks that matter to them. Nobody asked them for their input.

This clash leads to a company culture that perceives security training as a waste of time and effort. Both managers and employees rush through it, especially because the time allotted for training does not favor quality learning.

Employee-uninformed training can also obscure the connections between policies, plans, and procedures for employees. These training sessions provide no clear understanding of how protocols and guidance apply to individuals. The training does not cover specific work-related scenarios. Instead, the delivery is “war story” based, relaying the instructor’s past experiences about incidents, but making the principles feel distant and unrelated to employees’ day-to-day lives. While these stories are interesting and exciting to a few employees, the return on investment is lost in poor retention and a lack of application value.

In these cases, there is little information conveyed about the value of prevention, and the focus appears to be more on checking the box for compliance purposes.

Some organizations emphasize training solely on consequences. When the organizational focus is on employee misconduct and not the contributing factors, zero tolerance is the expedient management tool. Quality training takes a backseat to zero tolerance.

Under a zero-tolerance strategy, employees may question why the organization even invests in training because it feels like managers care more about punishment than finding the root causes for problems.

A company commitment and investment to adequate workplace violence prevention training reflects a culture of accountability and responsibility while defining the consequences for inappropriate behavior. Quality training suggests an interest in management’s commitment when accountability promotes investment. Training is perceived as essential in conveying employee education that helps staff understand how to proceed. Lack of clarity around these issues results in employees not reporting incidents, leaving supervisors in the dark about risks.

Finding Clarity Through Culture-Informed Training

Effective, culture-informed workplace violence prevention training is directly tied to an effective organizational response. Before designing a training program, consider the culture and background of the individuals being trained. Non-security personnel are different from security, former law enforcement personnel, and military veterans who have years of experience working in environments where understanding applications, vernacular, verbiage, and code phrases in execution is part of their ethos.

Non-security personnel face different personal and psychological challenges requiring thoughtfulness and compassion. This is where the importance of mindset applies. These employees are typically not accustomed to workplace threats, bullying, and acts of violence. They want to know what security protocols entail, why they exist, and how to apply training guidance. They are less likely to follow orders without question and want to clearly understand how protocols apply to them and affect their personal safety.

When designing workplace violence prevention training for adult employees, consider applying principles from Malcolm Knowles’ Theory of Adult Learning.

This theory contains six key assumptions about adult learners: self-concept, learning from experience, readiness to learn, immediate applications, internal motivation, and the “need to know” factor. Using the ideas in this theory can help organizational learning and development professionals create more meaningful learning experiences for employees, including about workplace violence prevention and security.

Here, we explore how some of the assumptions can be applied to adult learning for security.

Self-concept. As a person grows older, they shift from being more dependent to independent, Knowles posited. Therefore, the way they want to learn shifts from being instructor-led to more self-directed. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their training to fully engage with it.

Allow employee involvement through employee input and control over the subject matter they will be learning and how and when they access it, especially if training is offered as part of the organization’s learning management system (LMS). This allows for exploratory learning whenever an employee can schedule time in their day.

Learning from experience. As a person matures, they accumulate a growing reservoir of experiences that become a resource for learning. Adults gain more from training when they can pull from past experiences and validate what they are learning based on what they already know—this adds greater context to their learning. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities.

Instruction should discourage “war stories,” and lessons should include workforce and environment-specific context instead of primarily memorization. Learning should be framed in the context of known hazards and risks employees are more likely to encounter. They need to recognize those hazards to be able to apply prevention and risk mitigation measures.

Adults’ readiness to learn. Adults become ready to learn when they see that the subject matter relates closely to them. This is why environment-based experiences are important. Adults want to learn what they can apply right away in de-escalation, crisis communications, and conflict management. This makes training focused on future threats or scenarios not related to current applications less effective. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life. Therefore, training must focus on simple tasks that help employees understand the issue in front of them and what actions to take to mitigate risk.

Lessons that can be immediately applied. Adults’ perspectives change from procrastination to immediate application of learning as they grow. As a result, their orientation shifts from subject-centered learning to problem-centered, task-oriented, and life-focused learning.

Drill down on training that applies to specific teams, worksites, and environments to enable learners to apply their lessons right away.

Motivation to learn. Adults move from extrinsic towards intrinsic motivation as they grow and mature. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something because you want to earn a reward or avoid punishment, while intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it is personally rewarding to you. Adult learners want to be able to ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” and have a satisfactory answer.

Motivating employees to see that security training is in their best interest takes more than fear and safety. Each employee’s understanding of what constitutes workplace violence and risk motivators is different and must be understood in designing relevant training content. Employees will learn and apply content when the training makes sense and shares appropriate context (the what, how, and why).  Employees need to feel the content relates to them and that management also has a commitment to their safety and security.

Management can cultivate competence by supporting policies, plans, and procedures and promoting training the workforce perceives to be in its best interest. Therefore, employee involvement is critical in creating training that suits the workplace’s unique security threats and concerns. Employees are motivated by content that involves their input and is connected to their personal experiences and day-to-day duties.  

Company leaders must generate an atmosphere of commitment and investment that promotes a “personalized” interest in security. Without leaders’ backing around funding, budgeting, and training allocation, organizations may see adverse impacts on employee perceptions of the company culture. Senior management commitment and employee involvement endorse the outcome of a culture of mutual accountability, responsibility, and investment.

Source: ASSIS Online

Image: Freepik