Worth Reading – Workplace Abuse, PTSD and Employer Duty of Care

Just some of the raw data from this article caught me by surprise. These are results from UK workers:

• More than half of workers experience violence and abuse at work weekly or more (yes, you read that right)
• Police involvement was required in 22.6% of cases
• In most instances (46%), the perpetrators were customers; 9.2% cases involved co-workers, and 8.5% managers
• Some employees didn’t report the abuse, either because they felt they wouldn’t be taken seriously, or because violence was considered “part of the job”
• 32.8% said they experienced trauma as a result.

https://traumaatwork.substack.com/p/abuse-at-work-what-next

The post goes on to discuss the employer’s responsibility to care for their employees, which is important. The numbers are shocking without that conversation.

Look, if you’re in law enforcement or something similar, maybe, maybe, this could be considered part of the job, but there’s no way more than half of the workers are in that situation. That means that while we often talk about trauma outside of work and how it can impact your employees, we should also be talking about the trauma they are experiencing at work, from customers, yes, but almost 10% were getting it from coworkers.

Protecting employees from that kind of trauma should be non-negotiable. When it comes from outside, you still owe them safety, even if you can’t always predict it, but when it’s coming from within the organization, that should be easy enough to correct, right? Traumatizing your fellow workers is a non-starter. At least it should be.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me is to rethink what we consider traumatic life events. If 32.8% of these employees experienced trauma at work, we should be considering the health implications of work in the same way we do things like divorce, domestic violence, natural disasters, etc. Employees dealing with trauma outside of work often carry that trauma with them into work, and we need resources to help them navigate that. What do we offer people experiencing trauma at work who carry that trauma into the rest of their lives?

Maybe the better question is, what do we owe them?

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