Our Society has taken a new step to help curb the risk of workplace incidents involving active shooters and armed assailants by publishing the consensus-based technical report, “How to Develop and Implement an Active Shooter/Armed Assailant Plan.” The report provides recommendations from safety experts on how a business in any industry can better protect itself in advance of such an incident.

“When you can’t go too long in a calendar year before you see one of these incidents occur, it is a time when there is a need for guidance like this,” says Brian Hammer, Chair of the ASSP TR-Z590.5 Committee that authored the report, in an interview with Professional Safety.

The report covers topics such as performing site risk assessments, which can be crucial because it is the time to identify any vulnerabilities at the site. “You really need to look at your organization and say, ‘Where am I most vulnerable? Where are the most risks at my facility?’ These are the same techniques we use in the safety world to keep people safe from workplace injuries,” says Hammer.

The report also discusses updating or changing site safety and security through signage, key control, lighting and video surveillance, as well as badging and other identification systems. “We would encourage employers to strongly look at key control, badge control and camera control of their facility because they’re simply good safe practices securing the facility from vandalism and theft to make sure we can account for employees during emergencies,” says Hammer.

Additional topics covered in the report include:

• training staff through exercises and drills;
• hardening the site environments such as lobbies, entryways, perimeters, surveillance systems and lockdowns;
• postincident planning;
• performing a security plan audit.

You can listen to Hammer discuss how employers and workers can prepare for an active shooter situation in a new episode of the Standards and Tech Pubs podcast, the first installment of a three-part series about the technical report.