You run a successful business, employ some great people and all is well. Then the phone rings, and it is an employee who can’t come in because they were attacked on their way home last night.
Sure, almost every type of human resources issue has come across your desk but not this one. You never considered it a possibility that one of your staff was attacked on their way home from work.
The rest of the team start getting nervous about walking to their cars, and suddenly you consider investing in security cameras,personal alarms and maybe self defence training, but why wait until then?
Many occupations are at risk of violence in the workplace these days. According to the UK Health and Safety Executive:
“There were estimated 569,000 incidents of violence at work according to the 2014/15 CSEW, comprising 308,000 assaults and 261,000 threats.”
The aspect of self-defence does not only affect business owners or managers. If you are self-employed, you are also at risk.
Life Changing Or Life Altering Violence
If you head over to the land of Facebook or YouTube, you will see an endless supply of videos showing everything from carjacking defence to ‘anti-kidnap’ techniques.
It is almost as if every type of self-defence instructor tries to ‘sell’ the worst case scenarios to try and hook more people. In actual truth, I have found those videos to be more off-putting and damaging to the self-defence industry.
People cannot relate to machine gun wielding maniacs when they are thinking about heading to the local bar with friends on Friday night. However it is those venues and environments that life altering injuries happen, let me explain.
To most people, the term ‘life changing’ is scary and so it should be. Change is to become something completely different, and when it comes to physical assault, this could mean to get blinded by a glass smashed into your face, or even suffer a severe head injury that causes brain damage. This level of injury can and does happen to people on a regular basis.
However, in my experience, I have found life ‘altering’ injuries far more widespread.
For example, I once knew a man that was a self-employed Gas Engineer. He loved his job and every day he set off installing home heating systems. Then one weekend his friend was celebrating a 30th birthday to which he was invited and off the group went to the local town centre.
After consuming a few beers, one of the group got into an issue with another man at the bar, and this escalated, and as the group left the bar, a fight broke out. The gas engineer was attacked and suffered a broken jaw, arm and shoulder as a result.
Now this might seem like a simple case of recovering from injuries, and all is well. However because of the nature of the injuries and the surgery required to fix them it was anticipated that he would not be able to work for six months.
So let us consider this; that is six months without income, six months trying to find money. No holiday for the family, no money for rent or the mortgage and the list goes on.
I know of a young female that was glassed on a night out because of mistaken identity and I know of an older man that lost all his front teeth due to being punched in the face repeatedly while out for a quiet drink with his friends.
Now these are injuries that we can get over. However, they have implications. They can and do ‘alter’ our lives both on a physical standpoint an emotional one.
What You Can Do
It is true that a little bit of self-defence training goes a long way, however, having no self-defence training goes nowhere.
The Defence Lab syllabus has been shown to provide effective self-defence tips in just a few hours of training due to the nature of our techniques.
So check out our pages to find an instructor near you and get in touch with them. They will be able to help you to book an efficient training programme for your staff that fits into your busy work schedule.