Workplace Violence Prevention and Awareness

The Threat of Violence is On the Rise...
A safe and productive workplace is in everyone's interest, but
the number of violent acts, including threats of violence, has
increased over 400% over the last decade. Workplace Violence
Prevention and Education initiatives are paramount before an
incident happens, saving businesses considerable time, resources
in addition, legal fees, but most importantly, the implementation of mandatory changes to the workplace to protect employees from any future threat of a violent act. It is important to note that when experts refer to violent acts, they are referring to acts of violence by employees and criminal predators that commit armed robberies or assault employees while on the job.
Reality Hitting Home...
OSHA & NIOSH Statistics show that the risk of being attacked
while working is seven times greater in the U.S. than in Europe. Did you know that the number of managers killed has doubled over the past 10 years. Moreover, that only 40-50% of workforce victims report crime to the police. The threat of Workplace Violence has proven to be a challenge, it can occur internally (co-workers, self-inflicted) and externally (customer/employee, domestic violence, robbery/assault/rape) and can be physical or non-physical. Recent trends suggest that places of work are now the victims of domestic and international terrorist demands.
The Hidden Cost of Workplace Violence...
Organizational effectiveness, productivity, the culture and image are adversely impacted by a violent act at work including:
Lost work time (average of 3.5 days per incident for those
directly impacted); Increased security and facilities repair
costs; High probability of litigation; increased workers
compensation claims & costs; Increased medical claims; Personnel
turnover; increased incidents of stress between labor
organizations and management, significantly reduced performance & productivity & Negative internal and external publicity & press are but a few symptoms of the hostile workplace.
Personnel turnover is deeply rooted in an employee's unwillingness to be perceived as a troublemaker and resigns or asks for a reassignment rather than complaining. Such personnel turnovers are a company's worst nightmare, as they will undoubtedly volunteer to testify against the employer in the aftermath.
No one knows the exact dollar figure associated to workplace violence related exposure. Such costs are absorbed in increased medical and injury compensation claims under other unrelated ailments related to a workplace violence exposure. In this category might be the victims of harassment, verbal abuse and other forms of non-physical assaultive behavior but victims of psychological assault.

Geothermal Systems Need Duct Cleaning

Geothermal systems need duct cleaning, just like every other type of heating and cooling system. While the geothermal system may be a different type of HVAC system, keep in mind that the warm and cool air are blowing through the home's ductwork, so it is still important to keep everything clean.
There is some debate on the necessity of regular duct cleaning. Some experts recommend it should be done annually. Others say it should not be necessary until signs of mold or dust accumulation in the ducts are visible. Here are three good reasons a home owner should consider a professional duct cleaning for a geothermal system:
Although there is currently no proof that duct cleaning will result in a healthier home, it stands to reason that cleaner ducts will lead to cleaner air, or at least not cause dirty, dust-filled air. As all that air moves through the ducts before being delivered into the living spaces, it will blow air out into the spaces. As more dust is brought into the home, it is pulled in through the return air vents, and pulled into the geothermal system, where it is blown through ductwork again. This is why it is important to change the air filters every few months.
If there is no dust or debris in the ducts, there is nothing for the air to pick up and blow throughout the home. But as the dust is brought into the house from the outside, it pulls new dust into the geothermal system, which is why the ducts should be cleaned at least annually.
Consult a geothermal system professional about duct cleaning if one of the following three things are noticeable.
Mold growth inside ducts or black stains on the outside supply grills or on any parts of the geothermal system.
Evidence of rodents, vermin or insects inside the ducts.
Ducts are clogged with dust or debris, or there are visible dust particles being released into the home from registers.
A home's geothermal system is responsible for maintaining a comfortable and healthy environment in the home. As part of the seasonal maintenance program, it is important to talk to the service professional about duct cleaning. Clean ducts, like clean filters, may reduce allergens and other health threats as well as increase the system's efficiency to save money.
A good geothermal service professional should be willing to provide home owners a free, no-obligation checkup of the system's air ducts to see if they need to be cleaned. If they do, make sure they clean and sanitize all grilles and registers (including return air grilles), use a professional cleaning machine to vacuum the air ducts, and sanitize the ducts with an anti-microbial solution.

The Best Recruitment Strategies For Any Organization

The recruitment and consequent selection of the new employees are the most significant decisions a company can make. Whether small or big, employees are an important ingredient for the successful functioning of any organization. Therefore, it gets immensely important for any company to be able to choose the right candidates for their organization. To ensure that best people are hired, it requires thorough understanding of how to make that happen efficiently. In the following discussion, we would like to take a look at some of the best working recruitment strategies any company can use to hire the right workforce.

Efficient internal company environment plays a crucial role in the success of the company, and it can be regarded as one of the best recruitment strategies. If the company is serious about setting the culture of learning, training, expansion, and development for its employees, then the company can get good results when it comes to hiring new people. When you are able to maintain a healthy internal organization culture, you can use your existing employees as referral catalysts. In this way, you will not feel deficiency of getting good new talent. The ideal way for any company to hire the best people is to establish an internal culture where top employees want to work and a culture where they are treated with respect and attention.

What this means is that when you focus on the development of your existing employees, you will succeed as an organization in the best possible way. Not only do you keep the existing workplace with the company, but you create opportunities for them to prosper and enhance their knowledge to be able to get promotion or selection on other important positions within the organization. Without a doubt, a sound internal organizational culture should be your top most priority as an organization. It is, without a doubt, one of the most important recruitment strategies.

Many companies are trying to focus more on personality testing and less on standardized tests. They are trying to simplify the hiring procedure by dropping individuals from their potential candidate lists based on behavioral exams and other personality tests. Standardized exams are not a good indication of the actual performance capabilities of the candidate. This is a vital consideration when it comes to the best recruitment strategies.

Economic Studying Digging for Reality

Working in a market such as Dayton, OH requires business savvy and complete understanding of demographics. For instants the difference between Ohio on the whole and the Greater Dayton Area MSA, which includes such county areas as: Butler, Clark, Darke, Greene, Miami, Montgomery, Preble and Warren. The demographics of Montgomery and Miami are excellent for an expanding company to put in a service type outlet.

The population backdrop is somewhat similar to the entire state of OH. Ethnically speaking it is mostly white with Asian populations and Black Americans at about 10% to 11%. In Montgomery County it is 19% Black American and only 10% in Clark County, but the middle class Black Americans are moving in and fixing the diversity issues. There are quite a few people who commute to work in Marysville at the Honda Plant and Proving Grounds. Also a huge distribution center there with many large carriers located and Rail Service by CSX and also huge numbers of Auto Haulers. About 13,000 at Honda work there. One of the reasons that the Japanese wanted to have competing rail service with their plant in San Antonio as part of the negotiations. So they could squeeze the price point out of the rail companies similar to Rockefeller’s exploits. One thing that is unbelievably nice about the area is the many colleges and Universities in the area, 29 in all the biggest being University of Dayton with 10,000 enrolled, Wright University with 14,000 and Sinclair Community College with 22,000. This makes for a very good young and energetic group of people. The clientele is equally as inviting with 202,000 inhabitants between the ages of 25-34 not including the part-time college students. 35-44 representing nearly 250K pop and 45-54 at 215K.

The population South of Town is expanding and we see Scarsborogh to Centerville with great markets and everything in between is golden. The USAF also has Wright Patterson AFB with excellent inflow to the economy even though much of that is deployed presently, still it impacts the city in an extremely positive way. About 25,000 people work there and that is after the lay offs and discharges previously. They expect with BRAC that they will be on the receiving end of additional attachments and squadrons serving in Dayton as well as R and D since the colleges offer that level of researching. Also with the huge museum of flight and being the history of the inventing flight makes it good also for tourism and positive PR for the Military. Other large employers included Delphi but they have had significant labor lay offs and GM is a biggy there. In health Care about 9000 workers. Airborne Express and Emery Air freight also claim fame to the area. 7500 people work there and you may recall the merger with DHL? The good weather of the region provides Airborne a much better chance at this hub facility than in other parts of Michigan, IN, IL, NY, KY. The Seattle based company has brought many jobs to the region. Emery has laid off people but at one time employed over 3000 in the area. Emery has really worked hard to work with the Manufacturing industry and helped OH The just in time world of manufacturing has to take into account rush situations for total capacity scheduling, leading that charge was it’s bay area parent company and they manufacturing sector did rely on Emery for that;

Also of significant value is it’s ability to deploy new wave technologies at it’s hub and custom clearing houses. Much of this technology was in response to FedEx’s market advances and UPS shear size making it difficult to compete. The University of Dayton employs 4500 folks all fairly high wage earners like their blue collar UAW counter parts at the GM SUV and Delphi centers. Here is some recent news as of today’s watch: Dayton Recent News contains some Blues; For instance we all know the state of the Union when it relates to the steel industries.

At one time employing 4200 people. But Dayton is not primarily a steel town, it is a manufacturing town and the birth place of aviation. Today the market sectors which are up in the greater Dayton area include: Construction in residential, Retail is up, Real estate, Healthcare and services is big. Commercial construction is being primarily boosted with school projects recently. Square foot costs on the robust side of town south side is anywhere from $2.30 to $12.00 per square foot. Retail space is $2.30 to 3.00; Office is $7-12.00; Industrial runs the the entire spectrum. Office Parks include; Franklin, Heritage and South Tech Center all good for professional service businesses and small businesses. Industrial Parks are also plentiful with Emery Logistics Park 265 acres in all. Lebanon Commerce Center for 200 acres, Moraine Industrial Center and Park center Industrial. Although Manufacturing has declined drastically over the last decade the Industrial Parks have life. Downtown Office buildings include Kettering, Mead, First national, Reibold, 5/3 Bank and the Key Bank Buildings. Over 3 million square feet with a convention center right in the middle. There is significant space underutilized and unoccupied. Close by Cincinnati has done what academics think is unthinkable;

5 Powerful Reasons to Use Kaizen in the Workplace

Any student of management would have heard of the term Kaizen. It is a Japanese term that roughly means continuous improvement. It involves many small and incremental changes, preferably recommended by individual employees, which result in significant changes in a particular work process.
This interesting concept has brought about immense changes in the way manufacturing companies function and it is now being used in many different work environments with great results.
There are many advantages of using Kaizen in the workplace. These include:
- Reduction of waste in many areas such as inventory and manpower. This is achieved by streamlining the manufacturing and delivery process, getting rid of quite a few unnecessary steps.
- Improving product quality by reducing mistakes in the manufacturing process.
- Better employee relations since workers know that they are vital to the company's success not just because of their work but also because of their useful suggestions. This results in greater output as well as reduced employee turn-over.
- Increased safety at the workplace. This has a direct impact on costs since machine will break down less often and workers will have fewer accidents than before.
- Better customer service
Companies have to dedicate themselves to the concept of Kaizen in order to use it correctly. As a matter of fact, this management technique will only work if all the people in the organization, from the top right to the bottom, believe in it and implement it. Valuable suggestions can come from the people on the shop floor and also from employees in charge of dealing with customers. Companies that have a very receptive environment generate huge number of useful suggestions from employees. Amazingly, a very large proportion of these suggestions are eventually used because they tend to be well thought out.
Kaizen helps save a great deal of money and effort since it helps solve problems right at their source. Interestingly, the results that it offers are generally noticed immediately, thereby ensuring that people are motivated to make changes in various work processes. The other significant factor is that the changes do not generally require large investments. However their returns are immense. Therefore, many companies invest in the necessary training so that they know how to use it in the correct manner. These training programs ensure that all employees understand what is required of them so that they can make their company extremely profitable.

8 Tips For Spotting Early Warning Signs

One of the greatest threats facing both employees and the companies they work for, is workplace violence. It has become the leading cause of death for women and the second leading for men, following closely behind motor vehicle accidents. In fact, the best estimates now being reported show that 1-in-4 employees will be the victim of workplace violence this year alone.

While the media is quick to highlight the most deadly attacks that occur, the fact is that most employees will be lucky enough to only suffer from simple assaults. However, this is not to downplay the almost 400,000 aggravated assaults, 51,000 rapes and sexual assaults, 84,000 robberies, and nearly 1,000 homicides reported each year. I simply want to acknowledge that the average employee will not have to worry about death so much as being intimidated, struck, or threatened to comply with the assailant either through force or the threat of violence.

Spotting Early Earning Signs

As with all self-defense situations, correct action requires proper understanding so that we can know where to direct our awareness. Knowing what to look for will allow us to notice when something may be brewing and thereby allow us to take preemptive measures to prevent the danger from ever manifesting at all. After all, the ultimate goal of any reality-based protection program should be to set things up so that danger never touches you at all.

Workplace violence situations can be seen to have three aspects or characteristics that work together to produce the damage that inevitably results. Assaults always stem from a causal-based conditioning and never "come out of nowhere." These three parts or aspects are:

1. The assailant or perpetrator of the assault,

2. The preexisting or conditioning factors that cause the assailant to see violence as a justifiable means for attaining their goals, and...

3. An environment that allows for or permits the violent act to be committed without intervention, deterrence, or resistance.

Assaults never happen in a vacuum. They, like everything else, are the products of cause and effect. And, once set into motion - once these three factors are present - the force or conditions will play themselves out sooner or later.

In her book, "Risky Business: Managing Employee Violence in the Workplace", Dr. Lynne McClure describes eight categories of high-risk behaviors that may indicate the need for management intervention. She says these high-risk behaviors are everyday behaviors that occur in certain patterns. While the following clues are just that, possible warning signs, they will give management and employees enough of a basic understanding to cue in on the possibility of danger brewing on the horizon. The warning signs that may signal an impending workplace violence issue include:

• Actor behaviors: The employee acts out his or her anger with such actions as yelling, shouting, slamming doors, and so on.
• Fragmentor behaviors: The employee takes no responsibility for his actions and sees no connection between what he does and the consequences or results of his actions. As an example, he blames others for his mistakes.
• Me-First behaviors: The employee does what she wants, regardless of the negative effects on others. As an example, the employee takes a break during a last minute rush to get product to a customer, while all other employees are working hard.
• Mixed-Messenger behaviors: The employee talks positively but behaves negatively. As an example, the employee acts in a passive-aggressive manner saying he is a team player, but refuses to share information.
• Wooden-Stick behaviors: The employee is rigid, inflexible, and controlling. She won't try new technology, wants to be in charge, or purposefully withholds information.
• Escape-Artist behaviors: The employee deals with stress by lying and/or taking part in addictive behaviors such as drugs or gambling.
• Shocker behaviors: The employee suddenly acts in ways that are out of character and/or inherently extreme. For instance, a usually reliable individual fails to show up or call in sick for work. A person exhibits a new attendance pattern.
• Stranger behaviors: The employee is remote, has poor social skills, becomes fixated on an idea and/or an individual.

It can no longer be seen as a luxury or add-on to include procedures and training for dealing with workplace violence in your company's health and safety system. The costs, financially as-well-as to productivity, employee stress, and more, are far too great. Understanding and awareness are always the first step in to developing an effective plan. But, a solid, intelligently throughout and administered plan includes procedures, strategies, and techniques for, not only prevention and intervention, but deterrence and defensive action as well. The safer employees feel at all levels of an organization, the more relaxed the atmosphere and the greater the productivity.

Monopolies, Reality, OPEC and the FTC

It is interesting the OPEC Nations and the cartel, which affects the quality of our daily lives, personal success, the number of people who can enter our middle class, and all of our businesses and industries including your job. In our country we have rules about monopolies that we enforce on every large super heavy weight business in every industry. A recommended read would be the book on Rockefeller. If you have already read that book then you understand the remaining points and why we bring up the importance of flow and we are discussing it and comparing it to OPEC. Rockefeller was beholden to the market place and the supply and demand issues of the day. If his price got too far out of line, then others would jump into the game. OPEC constantly screws with our supply, much worse than the anti-trust issues of yester year.

If it is okay today for OPEC to play these games then certainly Rockefeller did nothing wrong, as a matter of fact, I have never heard of such an important concept such as Anti-Trust, which has so little reality based thinking and has undergone so few changes in the past 200 years. With all the ridiculous patch work within is regulations it throws out the entire idea of capitalism and competition. The laws are vague, utterly preposterous and reward the weak. The notion that bigness is automatically evil, dangerous to the welfare of free men or bad for the society as a whole makes no sense in a free market economy. The attack on Gate's Microsoft, by the FTC, after the people choose them and bought their products and continually wait until the next windows upgrade is beyond me. People vote with their dollar, they chose a company that fulfills their desires, purchase products and services from that company and this is bad? It appears that the FTC only attacks the visionaries and market winners. Well it must be something like that. Competitors who lose in the market place (Sand Box) go crying to momma or the liberal teacher of academia and liberal media?

Then at the same time when companies want to merge to share costs and use the efficiencies to get maximum use of the economies of scale they are forced into a box of questionable divestitures, all of which end up making the merger less of a good deal as it would have been and all these costs are past onto the consumer who would have had the greatest benefits in the long run. Yes that is right the very consumer that the FTC is sworn to protect. I give this example due to all the Tiger Marts, which closed after the Chevron Texaco merger. All the jobs lost and the hardship of customers to find a place to fuel up causing longer lines and therefore more demand and therefore higher prices, check the statistics if you disagree. Great so now you have high fuel prices, long lines and you are to thank the FTC for protecting you? From what, they caused it.

The theory that Monopolies, which started small and grew big due to the consumer choosing them over the competition is a testament of a strong free market system with tough competition forcing the best athlete forward for the gold metal and is merely survival of the fittest. It is about the most natural thing mankind has created. If growing big is evil then and anti-trust laws are to be enforced upon bigness then the entire government, by the people and for the people should be immediately shut down, because it was voted for by us, we chose it over other forms of government and it is friggin huge, talk about out of control with regulations. This alone would make it ready for anti-trust lawsuits, with it's finger on the flow of everything and in the colon fudge cake of everyone, every company and obviously up there own. You are looking for a retraction, doubtful if you would get one from someone who studies the flow and the cogs in the wheels of commerce, no apologies here, I am absolutely serious because a complete overhaul is needed. It is a complete joke, only it is NOT funny, because we are talking about the future of the greatest nation in the world and the rest of the planet's future depends on our example to follow in the next time one following this present period. Let's look at this from a distance.

When our Oil Companies here in the US wish to merge to create the economies of scale to compete, they go through 18 months of regulatory review and every congressman wants to go up to the podium to tell us what they think (actually why we should keep voting for them). Then these same oil companies are told they must divest themselves of certain pipelines, retail outlets, subsidiaries, trading rooms, etc. The consumer gets a better price when these larger companies can compete with the Cartels and can deliver for less. We force them to go offshore and own interests in the cartels to stay competitive.

Our stock market, your mother's 401K and father's pension do better when subsequent market sectors are more efficient and profitable. Especially those involving large industry and when the flow of fuel has profitable years and decades, steady growth in the market helps the strength of our nation. It is interesting that we allow foreign competitors more latitude than our own companies and then we create a hostile environment in the regulatory bureaucracy and cause our companies to move jobs, factories, refineries, etc to those same foreign lands. One might have to ask exactly whose team are we on? Let's face it, the growth of a business from small to large is a testament of commitment and hard work by the team running that company and their value to the consumer and my friends that is merely survival of the fittest and best prepared to take advantage of opportunities to serve the desires of the customers. Just like the republic or Democracy government voted into power by the people is a sign of the strength, trust and will of the people.

John D Rockefeller was a great man and delivered fuel to the people and enabled us to move the ball forward as we modernized our civilization.