Kennesaw shooting puts emphasis on work-related stresses

By Tammy Joyner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While last week’s deadly shooting at a Kennesaw truck rental facility puts a public face on workplace violence, security and crisis management experts say there are many more workplace problems that fly under the radar.

They’re continually being called on to handle toxic boss-employee relationships, overwhelmed workers, verbal threats, violent outbursts and other workplace problems that have intensified during the recession.

More than 2 million incidents of workplace violence occur in the United States every year, costing businesses $70 billion, according to EmployeeScreenIQ, a backgrounding firm.

As anxiety about layoffs, unemployment, natural disasters like last week’s Haiti earthquake and threats of international terrorism continues to rise, people are feeling increasingly out of control, and that stress manifests itself in myriad ways.

“The number of calls from companies asking us to defuse threats of violence has doubled in the last year and a half,” said Bruce Blythe, a former Marine who is now chief executive at Crisis Management International Inc. in Buckhead. “We do what we can to get people calmed down.”

Calls come in from human resource and security departments, plant managers, even attorneys. He said his firm handles about 800 crises a month nationwide.

Last week was particularly hectic for the company. On Thursday alone, for example, the firm dealt with 71 incidents — many of which involved companies across the United States trying to help distraught employees with relatives in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Mental health and employment services professions also are reporting more incidents of suicides, verbal and physical threats against their workers as the recession claims more jobs and turns individuals’ lives upside down.

“We’ve noticed for years, that as the economy goes down, workplace violence goes up. The reason for that is that workplace violence is ego-related,” said Blythe, who has handled 100 workplace shootings since 1988. He helped the U.S. Postal Service develop a workplace violence prevention plan after its string of shootings in the 1990s.

A lot of the outbursts that take place at work are because “people feel like they’ve been mistreated a lot of times,” said Brent Brown, of Chesley Brown Cos., a Cobb County security consulting firm that operates in 28 states and three countries.

Referring to this past week’s shootings in Kennesaw, he said: “It appears Penske was totally caught off-guard.”