Putting an End to Workplace Violence

What does it take to create a safe environment for employees? Park Dietz and other experts and CSOs discuss how to head off a security department's worst nightmare: Workplace violence.

By Daintry Duffy

February 01, 2004 — CSO — Workplace violence is seldom the freak episode that the media portrays it to be.

After a tragic incident, you almost always hear the same reactions from the neighbors. "He was a bit strange, but he was an amiable guy," one will say to the media. Or, "He looked average," says another, perhaps a resident in the same apartment building. "You'd say hi. He'd say hi. But he wasn't very outgoing."

That's how the people who knew, or thought they knew, Michael McDermott described him to the reporters afterward. He was a study in contrasts, they said, a surly, sarcastic man who nonetheless remembered to send out Christmas cards.

McDermott hadn't lived in this particular neighborhood long, but after his arrest, the local media descended like a hungry hoard, eager for the usual scraps of insight and professions of disbelief from shocked neighbors.

The descriptions that came from his coworkers were no more revealing. They said he was "soft-spoken," "a loner," "kind of antisocial," "quirky" and "peculiar." While such terms don't suggest a guy who was wildly popular among his coworkers, they also gave no indication that on Dec. 26, 2000, McDermott would get up from his desk at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, Mass., and wielding a semiautomatic rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a pistol, go on a shooting rampage that would take the lives of seven coworkers.

But in the days that followed the massacre, it became clear that this violent event, however random it seemed at first blush, was not entirely unpredictable. McDermott had been upset about an Internal Revenue Service request to garnish his wages for back taxes. Only a week before, he had had an angry outburst in the company's accounting department, where two of his victims were shot, and had lambasted the company for not taking his side against the IRS. The company had granted him a grace period on garnishing his wages until after the holidays, which made the day after Christmas bitterly meaningful for him. Looking back on the Edgewater environment, one coworker even confessed, "Of all the people that I thought could have done this...it was him."

Neighbors and relatives may claim to be shocked, but the people who once worked in close proximity to the individual often admit in retrospect to a suspicion that something wasn't quite right. Employees who act out in violence often have a history of aggression, absenteeism, rule-breaking, antisocial behavior and problems with authority. The one incident that gets everybody's attention is usually preceded by dozens of smaller episodes that managers and employees write off as "Fred being Fred" or "Bill just blowing off some steam."