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Interesting and Relevant Articles on Work Violence
HR on the Frontlines: Tackling Harassment and Customer Violence in the Workplace
HR often sorts out relationship dynamics between co-workers, but what about external harassment?
Business leaders should know that they can be legally liable for harassment and discrimination born from clients, vendors and customers.
For example, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ordered SmartTalent, LLC, to pay $875,000 to eligible claimants after the Washington-based staffing agency was found to have complied with client requests for male workers only.
Potentially trying to get ahead of a lawsuit, Buffalo Wild Wings issued an apology and fired two servers who complied with a racist customer’s request to re-seat Black patrons further away. A court also upheld a ruling in favor of a Costco employee who filed a hostile workplace claim, following more than a year of stalking, videotaping and unwanted touching by a customer.
Customer hostility is at an all-time high, per a 2022 report from Axonify, with lack of preparedness being a key issue voiced.
“It’s definitely an issue,” said Elissa Rossi, vice president of compliance for harassment training company Traliant.
According to the firm’s 2025 State of Workplace Harassment Report, most employees report experiencing harassment from supervisors and co-workers, with 14% of employees reporting having experienced harassment from a client, customer or other nonworker.
Rossi explained how addressing this genre of workplace problem can be tricky.
“There’s sort of straightforward harassment on the basis of a protected characteristic, like sexual harassment or other types of harassment,” Rossi said.
And then, she added, there’s “inappropriate boundary violations,” particularly in retail or other customer-facing roles, that might not be unlawful in the U.S. because it isn’t related to a protected characteristic.
Regardless of whether it’s a Civil Rights Act violation, Rossi said, it’s an issue both for employee mental health and for how businesses operate.
Workplace experts offered advice to address all kinds of customer-facing harassment and threats of violence before employers get to the point of litigation and emotional harm.
Harassment level: Annoying
Companies will vary in where they want to draw the line on annoying behavior, Rossi said. More companies are using either internal HR staff or external partners “to come up with thresholds or levels [to] say, ‘This is an issue not only for our employee but also for other customers in the store [and] other employees in the store.’”
As far as best practices go, Rossi said how different employers handle this level of issue is going to “run the gamut.”
Harassment level: Disruptive At some point, Rossi said, employees face a situation that can become much more extreme. And while employer best practices vary, Rossi did note a change in the workplace cultural climate as it pertains to retail and fast food.
“Maybe a decade ago or two decades ago, it would be either: Normal operations or call the police,” Rossi said. In recent years, however, some workplace policies are moving away from jumping to law enforcement.
Especially since increased attention paid to incidents of racially motivated police brutality, such as the 2020 killing of George Floyd, many inclusion experts have noted that calling the police on customers can be damaging and unnecessary.
A Philadelphia Starbucks barista’s decision to call the police in 2018 on two Black people sitting in the café prompted protests. That same year, a video of Alabama police using excessive force on a woman at Waffle House went viral. Similar instances of racial profiling occurred at an LA Fitness location in New Jersey and a CVS store in Chicago.
At the time, Janice Gassam Asare, a workshop facilitator and a workplace equity advocate, pointed out in one of her contributions to Forbes that employees in customer-facing environments have often “allowed their personal biases and prejudice to affect their actions.”
Asare invited employers to ask themselves a series of questions before calling the police, including whether the offending person has broken the law and whether an organizational procedure was violated.
Rossi recommends training employees in de-escalation tactics, which can be a good middle ground between “normal operations” and calling the police.
“Even if the person is definitely intentionally acting inappropriately, de-escalation can be a useful skill for an employee to have in their head — ready to use,” Rossi said. “Whatever happens with the customer in terms of sanction or penalty is something to be dealt with later.”
