ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Coping With Post Office Tragedies : Homicide: Fatal shootings in Dana Point and Dearborn, Mich., prompt Postal Service to take stock, seek answers to violence in the workplace.

The two recent senseless shooting tragedies in the Dana Point and Dearborn, Mich., post offices left me with a range of emotions--sadness, anger, outrage and frustration. Images of grieving family members and shocked employees during my visits to the sites of both tragedies will remain with me forever.

There’s never an excuse for violence in the workplace. Indeed, I wish I had answers to the questions employees and their families asked me. But I don’t have the answers that will end the trauma that continues to ripple through the American workplace and which too regularly visits the Postal Service.

The easy explanation is that the Postal Service, with its 670,000 full-time employees, simply reflects the violence that today is seemingly everywhere in American society. There is some truth in that statement. Others have pointed to the Postal Service’s authoritarian, production-oriented culture as a cause. It may be a contributing factor, but to lay blame on managers and supervisors ignores the complex web of variables that makes up workplace violence.

All kinds of jobs in our economy come with built-in stress. Yet, the vast majority of managers don’t push employees too hard. Moreover, 99.99% of postal employees don’t do violent things to fellow employees when they face job disappointments and frustration.

Nonetheless, we have a full ongoing investigation into the circumstances of the Dana Point and Dearborn shootings to see what we can learn from these dissimilar tragedies.

In addition to the investigations, I believe it is important for postal employees to talk to each other about the shootings to gather information. We have established a nationwide network of focus groups in every major postal facility to give employees and employee representatives the opportunity to discuss these events, the local working climate and relationships, and ideas for stopping future violence.

While these discussions go forward, we have been taking several steps that may help us prevent such future violence. They include:

* The postal Inspection Service talked with other federal agencies, including the FBI, to see if there were common denominators to prevent workplace murder by disgruntled employees. No such study exists, so we are developing our own.

* Toll-free hot lines to report workplace threats are operating.

* Stricter screening of job applicants is now a reality.

* Communications with postal unions and management associations has been strengthened.

* Last year we conducted the largest employee survey in the history of the American workplace. It told us things about ourselves that we knew but perhaps preferred to ignore. That survey is one tool that will help us change the culture of the Postal Service. For example, the annual evaluations of our top 550 executives and vice presidents will come from their subordinates.

These steps should make the Postal Service a safer place for our employees to work, and bring about the cultural change the Postal Service needs to move forward into the mid-1990s.

The recent violent events have focused attention on the postal workplace. Our entire work environment is changing as major automation is installed, replacing manual and mechanized mail processing. These are dramatic changes, and change inevitably causes stress.

So what caused the Dana Point and Dearborn tragedies? I don’t have all the answers, and probably never will. I wish I knew what causes irrational behavior by irrational individuals.

I do know that America needs to come to grips with the growing phenomenon of settling grievances with guns and fists.

In looking for some common factors that might be prevalent in violent workplace incidents, communications seems to be an area where there may be some relationship. There is a need for everyone to listen to and talk to each other, and keep open the lines of communications. But sometimes communications between top management and some level of supervision going down the line, and communications filtering up from employees, somehow gets stifled. That’s one area that corporations must be aware of because if there are stresses in the workplace, an early warning sign could be found in this communications line.

Another common factor is that workers often are too cavalier about violence in the language they use. Everyone has to be more sensitive to such expressions and what they could lead to.

We have been discussing the possibility of putting together a panel of corporate executives and academic and professional experts to explore what the nation’s businesses can do to curtail workplace violence.

America also has to come to grips with the eccentric. Too many locations have weak or unenforceable stalking laws, and too many men and women are falling between the mental health safety nets, becoming threats to themselves and others.

In a free society, the individual’s rights need to be protected. But somehow we have to balance the individual right with the collective good. Our post offices, public buildings and cultural institutions must not become hostage to the small percentage of irrational and violent personalities. Corporate America has to join together to solve this growing problem of workplace violence.