Fort Hood: Violence at Work Preventable?

What happened at Fort Hood is every employer’s worst nightmare. (Read other posts on the shooting at Ft. Hood.) Employers conduct training on workplace violence, including training on how to spot an employee capable of workplace violence. The situation involving Major Nidal Malik Hasan demonstrates the difficulty of putting the training into action.

Now that Hasan is being examined with a magnifying glass, some point to tell-tale signs of an unstable and possibly violent person. He was harassed because of his religion. He dreaded being deployed to Afghanistan worse than anything. Treating an ever-increasing number soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder placed him under increasing stress. He was suspected of posting an inflammatory statement on the Internet about suicide bombers, but presumably that had been investigated with no concrete evidence he was the author.

Moreover, he was a good worker. He wasn’t personable but wasn’t considered a loner. He didn’t go out of his way to socialize, but he got along with people. His colleagues, friends, neighbors, and relatives describe him as unassuming and kind. He was a religious man.

Unless you consider the Internet posting, he had made no threats. He had no violence in his past. He was a psychiatrist devoted to healing troubled soldiers returning from combat.

In hindsight, some might argue that the Army should have been more alert to what Hasan was capable of doing, but that’s somewhat unrealistic based on the facts known at the time. The Fort Hood incident is a reminder of how vigilant employers should be in trying to spot and prevent workplace violence. It’s also a reminder of how most incidents of workplace violence come blazing out of the blue and are regrettably unstoppable.

Learn more in the HR Guide to Employment Law: A practical compliance reference manual covering 14 topics, including hiring, discipline, and documentation, and workplace violence.