Violence at work continues to be a critical issue for many businesses in the UK. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) there was an estimated 698,000 incidents of violence at work from 2015 to 2016, whilst 67% per cent of violence at work resulted in no physical injury. Verbal abuse and threats are the most common types, whilst physical attacks are comparatively rare.

What is work-related violence?

The Health and Safety Executive’s definition of work-related violence is “any incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work.” 

A growing problem for the retail industry

Workplace violence is a growing concern for the retail sector in particular. In 46% of cases, offenders are complete strangers, meaning any person who has contact with members of the public is at risk, especially for those who handle money, work alone or whose line of work takes them out of the workplace, such as:

• Retail sales staff
• Petrol station staff
• Security officers
• Delivery drivers
• Store managers
• Checkout operators
• Restaurant and fast food operators

Recognising the issue in your workplace

With violent crime rising by 19% in the UK and the Police workforce in England and Wales seeing an overall drop of 18% since 2010, it’s never been more important for employers to take action to prevent violence at work and protect their employees. When your team doesn’t feel healthy, happy and safe in the workplace, they’re not able to perform tasks to the best of their ability. Recognising the issue is the first stage of developing an effective strategy, but with the right approach you can tackle the issue head on, improving health and safety in your workplace, resulting in reduced absenteeism, an improved brand image and heightened morale. 

Streamlining incident reporting procedures

Any form of workplace violence is serious – and at times fatal – so it’s important to combine effective safety training and education with smarter procedures and cutting-edge technology. Synapse is a leading incident reporting application that’s designed to streamline operations by removing manual processes, allowing employees to quick and easily create report a wide range of incident types with customised workflows, forms, validations, communications and actions. This award winning technology is built into an intuitive mobile app with a central intelligence database collating the data and analysing intelligence, offering organisations:

• Proven cost-savings and ROI
• Streamlined operations management
• Improved efficiency of communications
• Easily configured automatic alerts, notifications and escalations
• More accuracy of client reporting
• Quick deployment and easy adoption
• Real-time reporting and a customisable dashboard
• Built-in algorithms calculating the priority and severity levels
• More accurate evidence captured and presented in a compliant way

With Synapse you can encourage employees to report incidents and improve communications, not just internally, but with the emergency services too. Becoming part of your emergency action plan, Synapse can help you provide law enforcement and emergency services with accurate incident information and complete compliance – resulting in a safe, proactive, efficient, secure and caring workplace.

• Critical events/incidents
• Dashboards & analysis
• Infrastructure