Managing Occupational Violence and Aggression: A Psychosocial Risk Management Approach.
Occupational violence and aggression can occur in almost any workplace. A nurse may be threatened by a distressed patient. A retail employee may be verbally abused by an angry customer. A council worker may encounter aggression while conducting an inspection. A call-centre employee may receive threatening phone calls. A utility worker entering private property may encounter an aggressive resident. And violence or aggression can also occur between colleagues.
Occupational violence in Australia – 5 numbers to know:
- 56% – increase in serious workers’ compensation claims for workplace violence and assault over five years (to 2022).
- 65,860 – accepted workers’ compensation claims for assault or exposure to workplace/occupational violence over 10 years.
- 108,000 – approximately the number of Australians whose most recent physical assault in 2024–25 occurred at work. (1 in 4)
- 175,000 – approximately the number whose most recent face-to-face threatened assault occurred at work.
- 73% – increase over 10 years in workplace physical-violence claims made by women.
[sources: Safe Work Australia; ABS]
While the circumstances vary, the principle for organisations is increasingly clear: occupational violence and aggression should be managed as a foreseeable work health and safety risk, including as a psychosocial hazard—not simply as a difficult interpersonal situation or something employees need to become more resilient to.
Safe Work Australia defines workplace violence and aggression broadly to include incidents where a person is abused, threatened or assaulted at work or while carrying out work, including interactions occurring in person, by telephone or online. Australian WHS guidance, for psychosocial hazards and risk management, requires organisations to eliminate or minimise associated health and safety risks so far as is reasonably practicable.
This changes the question leaders should ask.
- Rather than simply asking, “How do we train our employees to deal with aggressive people?”,
- organisations should ask: “What is it about our work, work environment and systems that exposes our people to aggression or violence—and what can we change to prevent or minimise that exposure?”
That is the starting point for a psychosocial risk management approach.
Violence and aggression can take many forms
The term occupational violence can sometimes create the impression that organisations only need to worry about serious physical assault. In reality, the spectrum is much broader.
Workplace violence and aggression can include verbal abuse, threats, yelling, intimidation, pushing, hitting, kicking, spitting, throwing objects, sexual assault, armed robbery and threats involving weapons. It can originate from customers, clients, patients, members of the public, contractors or other workers.
The risk can also occur through digital channels. Employees working in customer service, complaints, compliance, professional services and other public-facing roles may experience abusive emails, threatening messages or aggression over telephone and online platforms.
Occupational violence and aggression is often discussed in terms of customers, patients or members of the public. However, violence can also arise between workers, particularly when interpersonal conflict combines with demanding working conditions.
Consider two experienced technical tradespeople working together at a remote site on a hot summer afternoon. The job is taking longer than expected, both workers are physically fatigued, and there is pressure to complete the work before the end of the shift. One worker criticises the other’s approach to the task. The other responds defensively. What begins as disagreement about the work becomes swearing and personal criticism. One worker steps towards the other and pushes him. Within seconds, the confrontation develops into a physical fight.
It would be easy to view this solely as a behavioural or disciplinary issue: two employees lost their tempers and behaved inappropriately. Clearly, workers remain responsible for their behaviour, and physical aggression should be addressed through appropriate workplace processes. But a psychosocial risk management approach also asks a broader question: What workplace conditions contributed to the escalation, and what could reasonably have been done to reduce the risk?
Look upstream, not only at the fight. For supervisors and WHS professionals, the investigation should therefore go beyond determining “Who started it?”
Importantly, not every incident needs to result in physical injury to cause harm. Frequent verbal abuse, intimidation and threats can create significant psychological risk. SafeWork NSW notes that prolonged, severe or frequent exposure to workplace violence can contribute to psychological injury, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The cumulative effect matters. An employee who deals with an abusive customer once may recover relatively quickly. An employee who deals with aggressive customers repeatedly, while also experiencing excessive workload, inadequate staffing and limited supervisor support, may face a very different level of risk.
Think beyond the aggressive individual
One of the most useful shifts in managing occupational violence is moving away from seeing aggression solely as a problem located within the person displaying the behaviour.
Sometimes the aggressor is clearly the source of the immediate danger. However, the organisation still controls many of the conditions that determine whether workers are exposed to that danger and how effectively they are protected from it.
For example, risk may be increased by:
- employees working alone or in isolated locations;
- challenging environment conditions (such as heat, noise);
- night work or after-hours contact;
- handling cash, drugs or valuables;
- providing services to people who are distressed, angry or affected by alcohol or drugs;
- enforcement, compliance or refusal-of-service activities;
- inadequate staffing;
- poorly designed reception or customer-service areas;
- long waiting times or confusing customer processes;
- lack of clear escalation procedures;
- insufficient security arrangements; or
- exposure to multiple psychosocial hazards at the same time.
Queensland’s WHS regulator specifically identifies factors such as lone work, night work, community work, service provision to distressed or angry people and service systems that generate frustration—for example, excessive waiting times—as potential contributors to violence and aggression.
This systems perspective is important because it shifts prevention upstream.
Consider a customer service team experiencing increasing aggression. Training employees in de-escalation may certainly help. But an effective risk assessment might also discover that customers are waiting 45 minutes before speaking to anyone, employees have limited authority to resolve problems, staffing has been reduced during peak periods, and supervisors are unavailable when conversations escalate. In this situation, aggression is not solely a “customer behaviour” problem. There are organisational conditions potentially influencing both the likelihood of aggression and the consequences for employees.
Apply the psychosocial risk management process
Safe Work Australia recommends applying the familiar WHS risk-management process to psychosocial hazards: identify hazards, assess the associated risks, implement controls to eliminate or minimise those risks, and regularly review whether controls remain effective. Workers and their representatives should be consulted throughout the process.
Start by understanding exposure rather than waiting for a serious incident. Risk assessment should consider both the likelihood and potential consequences of violence or aggression. The question is not simply “How often does aggression happen?” It is also “Under what conditions does it happen, who is exposed, how serious could the consequences be, and what else is occurring around that exposure?”
Organisations need to be particularly careful not to default immediately to training. Training is important—but training alone is rarely an adequate risk-control strategy.
Safe Work Australia’s approach includes providing a safe physical and online work environment, implementing safe systems and procedures, establishing appropriate policies, and providing workers with information, training and supervision.
Higher-level controls might include eliminating unnecessary cash handling, redesigning service delivery, introducing electronic transactions, changing how high-risk customers or clients are managed, preventing lone work in identified high-risk situations, improving staffing during high-risk periods, installing physical barriers, improving lighting or access controls, providing duress alarms, improving communications and providing appropriate security. WorkSafe Victoria similarly recommends considering workforce planning, rostering, resource allocation, physical workplace design, supervision, escalation structures and processes for limiting or ending high-risk contact.
The objective is to design a layered control system, rather than expecting one intervention to solve the problem.
The role of leaders and supervisors
Supervisors and managers have an important operational role because they often determine whether organisational controls work in practice.
Imagine that an organisation has an excellent occupational violence policy, but a supervisor routinely tells employees: “They’re just angry customers. Don’t take it personally.”
The formal system and the lived culture are now sending two different messages. Leaders need to make it clear that reporting aggression is legitimate and useful. Reporting should be treated as information about risk—not as evidence that an employee could not cope.
Managers should also understand escalation thresholds. Employees need to know when they have authority to terminate a phone call, leave a location, refuse service, summon security, activate a duress alarm or seek immediate assistance.
A strong safety culture therefore does not celebrate employees for simply tolerating aggression. It establishes clear boundaries around what employees are—and are not—expected to endure in order to perform their work.
De-escalation and worker resilience training still matters—but put it in the right place. There is an important role for psychologically informed training. Employees in higher-risk positions may benefit from learning to recognise early signs of escalation, regulate their own communication, maintain appropriate physical distance, use calm verbal and non-verbal communication, acknowledge concerns without agreeing to unreasonable demands, establish boundaries and recognise when de-escalation is no longer appropriate.
However, training should support—not replace—effective work design and risk controls. WorkSafe Victoria explicitly advises organisations not to rely on training, instruction and information as the main or only methods of controlling work-related violence.
Prevention should be the priority, but organisations also need a clear post-incident response. The immediate priorities are safety, medical attention where required, securing the environment and activating emergency or security procedures. Once immediate safety has been addressed, employees should receive practical and psychological support. The organisation should also investigate the event from a learning and prevention perspective.
Watch for cumulative exposure
One serious incident is easy to notice. Twenty lower-level incidents may be less visible—but psychologically significant. WorkSafe Victoria recommends that organisations consider monitoring cumulative exposure to aggression and violence to identify employees who may require additional support. Organisations should therefore examine patterns across teams and roles rather than only individual incidents.
10 practical tips for preventing and managing occupational violence and aggression
1. Treat aggression as a WHS risk, not simply a people problem.
Apply your organisation’s formal risk-management framework: identify, assess, control and review. Include psychological as well as physical harm.
2. Ask employees where the real risks are.
Workers doing the job usually understand where situations escalate. Use consultation, toolbox talks, focus groups, HSR discussions and incident reviews to capture this knowledge.
3. Make reporting simple—and psychologically safe.
Remove unnecessary paperwork, clarify what should be reported and demonstrate that reports result in action. Monitor near misses and threats as well as physical assaults.
4. Analyse patterns, not just incidents.
Look for hotspots involving particular locations, shifts, tasks, customer interactions, waiting times, staffing arrangements and lone-working situations.
5. Design out risk wherever reasonably practicable.
Consider environmental design, barriers, lighting, secure areas, communication systems, duress alarms, electronic transactions, staffing arrangements and alternative service-delivery methods before relying on employee behaviour.
6. Give employees permission to disengage.
Define when employees can terminate a call, leave a site, refuse or discontinue service, seek security assistance or escalate to a supervisor. Employees should not have to improvise these boundaries during a threatening situation.
7. Train for realistic situations.
Provide role-specific training in situational awareness, dynamic risk assessment, communication, de-escalation, boundary setting and emergency response. Use realistic scenarios and rehearsal—not just information-based training.
8. Train managers as well as frontline employees.
Managers need to know how to recognise risk, respond to reports, support employees after incidents, escalate safety concerns and avoid normalising aggression as “part of the job”.
9. Monitor cumulative exposure and recovery.
Look beyond serious events. Frequent verbal aggression, threats and emotionally intense encounters can accumulate. Consider exposure patterns, workload, staffing, supervision and opportunities for recovery.
10. Learn from every significant incident.
Review whether controls actually worked. Focus on system improvement rather than blame. Ask what can be changed in the environment, work design, staffing, procedures, technology, supervision or customer-management system to reduce recurrence.
Prevention is ultimately about work design
Perhaps the most important principle is that occupational violence and aggression should not become normalised simply because it is common in a particular industry.
The nature of the work may mean that risk cannot always be completely eliminated. But “it comes with the job” is not a risk-control strategy.
Effective organisations continually ask what can reasonably be changed to reduce the likelihood, frequency and consequences of aggression. They examine job design, staffing, physical environments, service systems, technology, leadership, reporting, escalation processes, training and post-incident support.
This is what distinguishes a psychosocial risk management approach from an individual coping approach.
The goal is not simply to develop employees who are better at tolerating occupational violence and aggression. It is to develop workplaces that are better at anticipating it, preventing it, protecting people from it and learning when it occurs.
Contact us to talk further about leadership support, deescalation and resilience training and psychosocial risk management consulting for occupational violence and aggression.
References and further reading
Safe Work Australia. Preventing workplace violence and aggression guide. Australian Government.
Safe Work Australia – Preventing workplace violence and aggression guide
Safe Work Australia. Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work. Australian Government.
Safe Work Australia – Managing psychosocial hazards at work
Safe Work Australia. Workplace violence and aggression – Managing risks. Australian Government.
Safe Work Australia – Workplace violence and aggression
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. Violence and aggression. Queensland Government.
WorkSafe Queensland – Violence and aggression
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice 2022. The Queensland Code was amended with changes taking effect from 1 September 2026.
Queensland Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice
WorkSafe Victoria. Aggression or violence: guide for employers and supporting risk-management guidance.
WorkSafe Victoria – Aggression or violence guide for employers
SafeWork NSW. Violence in the workplace guide. NSW Government.
SafeWork NSW – Violence in the workplace guide
This article provides general information about workplace psychological health and safety and should not be relied upon as legal advice. Organisations should refer to the WHS/OHS legislation, regulations, codes of practice and regulator guidance applicable in their jurisdiction.