Get out of view

When hiding from a violent individual, find an area that’s out of view. Lock the door, if possible, and barricade the entrance as best you can.

Britt warns against having a “false sense of security” if you’re hiding in a room with keycard access. The shooter has a weapon and easily could threaten or harm a worker to obtain their card.

Stay quiet and silence your cellphone. Britt says to take a knee or crouch in the middle of a room, which lowers your risk of being hit by bullet spray from the shooter’s chest or shoulder level.

He adds that a shooter typically will look for other potential victims rather than tussle with a locked door.

However, Pobirsky says, if you think the shooter could reasonably gain access to a room, position yourself behind where the door opens. This way, you may avoid being an easy a target and also have an opportunity to disarm the shooter. (More on that in a moment.)

If you believe the shooter isn’t likely to return, remain in the middle of the room, away from the wall.

Disarm the attacker?

Fighting the perpetrator should be considered only as a last resort.

Depending on your work environment, many different items can be used as “improvised weapons” to incapacitate a perpetrator, Britt said. They include machinery, laptops, keyboards, monitors, fire extinguishers and other office equipment.

“You do not have to be any type of officially trained person,” Britt said. “You can use all types of stuff in the office. There’s a lot of different things you can use to support that defense. It’s just getting out of that limitation, ‘Well, I don’t have a weapon.’ You probably do; you just had never thought that you could use it that way.”

Go into detail

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that 481 workplace homicides occurred in 2021 – a 22.7% increase from the previous year, and the highest annual total from 2017 to 2021.

Experts urge employers to be aware of the frequency of these incidents without making employees feel afraid to come to work.

Pobirsky said it’s challenging to simulate the feeling when “someone is actively trying to do significant harm to you or your co-workers.” The intensity only heightens during a true active shooter event, so employers should discuss with workers the physiological and mental changes that often take hold.

“Talking about what happens to the body, the mind, how people get tunnel vision, how people get intense anxiety, and their heart rate is off the charts and they lose fine motor functions because all the blood is rushing to your internal organs to protect your core,” Pobirsky said. “That’s just how we’re designed.

“There’s a lot that happens that we sometimes are aloof about, and we shouldn’t be.”

An effective plan – and practice – can help workers become more aware of what happens during these situations and how to respond.