By Dan Stechow, CEO, The Power of Preparedness
That’s the question I’m opening our webinar with on Tuesday, October 13. I already know how most of the room will answer it, because I’ve asked it for years: “I don’t know. And I’m not sure anyone here does.”
That isn’t a criticism. The people I talk to in retail, grocery, and food service work hard to keep their teams safe. The problem is that the total cost of workplace violence was never built to be counted in one place, and without that number, requests to invest in prevention rarely carry the weight they need to get approved.
So I’ve assembled a panel of experts from different industries and different roles to show what most organizations are up against, and we’ll release a free tool built to help break the logjam.
The number nobody owns
Every company is already paying for workplace violence. It just pays in separate pieces, under different names, in budgets that are seldom added up or compared across departments.
Think about one ordinary incident. A customer is refused a r eturn and strikes an employee at the register. She’s out for three weeks. Police come. Later, she hires a lawyer. Two coworkers saw it, and one of them quits within the month:
Now follow the money:
– Asset protection logs the incident, pulls the video, and spends hours on the investigation. All of it is counted in events and hours, none of it in dollars.
– HR books the departure as turnover. The exit interview says “pay” or “scheduling.” Replacing an employee runs roughly 16 to 21 percent of annual pay, and nobody ties it back to the assault. Absenteeism, medical costs, and lost productivity land in HR the same way, under other names.
– Insurance shows up a year or more later, when the claim moves the experience mod and the renewal lands in finance’s inbox with no visible link to what happened.
– Litigation starts the clock the day the lawyer is retained. Years later, every policy, warning, prior incident, and decision gets reconstructed and examined, and people across the company get pulled into it.
The claim is only the opening entry. The full cost runs several times higher, spread across at least six budgets, and no single department can see the total. Even a dedicated risk function, where one exists, sees more than any other department and still has to go looking for the rest.
We’ve started calling this the Aggregation Gap: the distance between what a company already pays and what it can count. It matters for a simple reason. When nobody can see the total, a prevention request has nothing to be weighed against, so everything looks expensive, whether it’s bought from a vendor or built in-house. The request either fails to get approved or, if it does, nobody can show what it changed.
Seven people, one table
Our panel is made up of the people who actually hold each piece of the puzzle. Each of them speaks from their own professional experience, not on behalf of an employer or association, and every example we use is hypothetical.
– Tom Stein, RLPSA: Food service asset protection. First on scene, first to document, and he tried to add up costs across departments 25 years ago and ran into the same wall.
– David Johnston, NRF: A career in retail asset protection, now looking across an entire industry. He knows why sound requests so often lose in the budget meeting.
– Dennis Butler: Employee relations executive (ret.). Why so much of the cost lands in HR under other names: turnover, absenteeism, medical cost, and lost productivity.
– Susan DeVaughn, IMA Insurance: The bill that arrives a year late, and what underwriters want to see at renewal.
– Charlie Ahmad, Group 9: Forensic security and litigation support. What gets reconstructed and examined after an incident, and why documentation decides so much.
– Tom Cosgrove, FMI: The grocery industry view: why companies are looking harder at this cost, and why it has been so difficult to benchmark.
– Eva Sandoval, Hy-Vee: Enterprise risk. The one role built to see across departments, and why even there the total has to be assembled on purpose.
We’ll work one incident around the table, person by person, so you can watch the total build. Then we’ll get practical about the harder question: in your company, who would have owned that number?
A calculator built to start a conversation
TPOP has built a free Workplace Violence Cost Calculator to start the conversations between departments that it takes to close the Aggregation Gap.
It’s private. The tool is downloadable and runs in your browser. It’s a stand-alone file with no back-end connection, and nothing you enter leaves your computer.
It’s quick. A few inputs you already have give you a starting number. Two more, from HR and your broker, give you a number you can defend.
It shows its work. Every default comes from a published benchmark, every source is listed, and every default can be changed to match your own numbers.
Here’s the part I care about most: it gives the people tasked with preventing violence a clearer picture of what it costs, tells them which departments hold the pieces, and lets them weigh a prevention investment against the costs it’s meant to reduce, using their own numbers rather than anyone else’s.
I’ll also be straight about its limits. It doesn’t count everything. Domestic violence spilling into the workplace, for one, isn’t in there, so your real number is likely higher. And since there’s no published benchmark for how much training reduces incidents, we leave that assumption to you rather than invent one.
Join us, and bring two numbers
The Total Costs of Workplace Violence: The Number Nobody Owns – Tuesday, October 13, 2026 · 2:00 PM Eastern / 1:00 PM Central · Live and free Hosted by The Power of Preparedness, with panelists from NRF, FMI, and RLPSA.
Register here | Try the calculator
If you want a head start, here’s the exercise I’ll leave everyone with on Tuesday. You can do it this week:
– Ask HR what it costs to replace one hourly employee.
– Ask your broker what one claim does to next year’s premium.
– Run the calculator with those two real numbers.
– Take the result to one person who controls a budget.
Your company is already paying this cost. Adding it up is the step that changes the conversation. I hope you’ll join us.
Dan Stechow is CEO of The Power of Preparedness, which provides workplace violence prevention training and the PreparednessOS framework to retail, food service, healthcare, and other industries.
