Having accurate insights into the mechanics of your organisation provides a powerful advantage for your security management team.

The collection, integration, analysis and presentation of live data (both from field-based operations and a financial lens) can be turned into insightful and actionable business decisions when done effectively.

The purpose of business intelligence in today’s world of security

Gathering data to better understand how a business is operating – to be able to drill down into the data – is the lifeblood of any effective business growth strategy. Weaknesses and inefficiencies are highlighted to management teams, enabling the right changes to be made. Proactivity becomes possible with the benefit of foresight that facilities management data provides.

Access to accurate business data provides many advantages for an organisation.

Business intelligence helps in:

• Problem solving
• Understanding performance
• Accelerating decision making
• Customer retention
• Problem solving

Management can pinpoint what went wrong, tracking and reviewing data collected to uncover performance breakdown, enabling better understanding of each part of a process that may have failed. The data can help decipher which areas of a job are not performing as they should, highlighting the steps that need to be fixed.

Understanding performance

By collecting and reviewing data from all parts of the business, workforce management software solutions provide management teams with visibility into what is happening throughout the organisation. Understanding levels of performance is key. Not understanding how well the business, its departments, or its employees are performing, renders an organisation blind and it will continue to waste money on areas that are not providing sufficient ROI.

Accelerating decision making

Having accurate organisational data helps executive teams understand and improve business processes in order to reduce wasted money and time. Whilst this is key for all security companies, it is particularly important to companies serving an international audience, where decisions are inherently more complex, if for no reason more than the accommodation of time zones. Management can make informed decisions to protect the bottom line when they can clearly see where problems are occurring or processes are ineffective, no matter how dispersed.

Supporting customer retention

In the security sector, the workforce is generally large and dispersed, and the ability to see the activities and effectiveness of each contract, team, shift and officer is extremely valuable, particularly when issues arise. Giving management an overview of the situation, understanding where the gaps are or where the service may be failing, provides intelligence that can save a failing contract.

Organisations are realising that having this powerful information at their fingertips is helping them streamline their operations whilst providing robust, quality service to their customers.

Graeme Hughes

Managing Director

TEAM Software by WorkWave

www.teamsoftware.com

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The post Business Intelligence for security cuts risk and supports growth appeared first on City Security Magazine.

Communicating to your distributed workforce may seem simple, but there are complexities to protecting your security guards while they’re in the field.

Those complexities can be lessened with specific strategies and solutions aiming at protecting your workforce. In this article, we outline mobile technology attributes that can help deliver an end-to-end picture of communications while protecting field-based officers.

Mobile technology and employee self-service portals as communication channels

In the past decade, in-field technology has drastically changed. Mobile device use is now normal, if not standard, for distributed workforces across the globe. A workforce management solution specifically designed for the security industry can help with one of your biggest challenges as an employer: communicating with your field-based officers, no matter how dispersed.

It sounds simple. On average, people spend close to 16 per cent of their day on their phones – including time spent sleeping. As such, communication is sometimes taken for granted. However, it’s important to have company-approved protocols on how to reach officers and which channels to convey messages, gather information and act.

Specific messaging tools and protocols should also be in place to minimise personal device use on the job while giving your officers a way to transfer information to their supervisor or the contract management team.

Often this can be achieved through messaging tools integrated with your workforce management solutions. Integration also gives your back office an end-to-end picture of communication delivery, opens, responsive queries and more. Keep in mind these needs:

• One-way communications (notifications to officers)
• Responsive communications (messages meant to elicit a response)
• Communication delivery confirmation
• Quick-access messages, like SMS text or push notifications
• Message targeting, including individual, small group and company-wide functionalities (useful in instances of policy awareness communications)
• Employee self-service portals which can operate as hubs of information

These types of communications are quicker, more reliable and more secure than antiquated solutions, like radios, in supporting your field-based officers.

Improving safety with alerts

It’s not uncommon for officers to work lone or small team patrols. As such, it is critical they have quick access to tools that can signal emergency duress. By configuring SOS submission protocols that are as easy to access as book-on or book-off time-keeping options, security companies show they value their workforce’s safety and prioritise their well-being above all else.

It’s also important to consider location tracking as a method of ensuring officer safety. Often, location tracking is considered as a method of certifying proof of delivery of services to your clients. While it’s a great tool to accomplish that, it also serves as liability proof for the benefit of your officers, who are able to prove their location at given times during shifts if incidents should occur. It provides clear and concise situational awareness to their employers and their clients.

Automating communications for faster incident resolution

Officers should be able to reply to work site instructions, log progress on patrol routes, manage safety and have a direct line of communication with their supervisor (and vice versa) to ask questions and more. It’s a reality that officers sometimes face incidents that compromise safety – for themselves, or the public at large. In that case, it’s crucial to have systems in place to quickly respond to critical incidents.

Through automated configurations, you can keep officers connected to command centres, capture photos and locations of incidents, and trigger response protocols that alert supervisors, response teams and even client property managers or stakeholders of an incident in progress. Once resolved, the same communication channels can deliver reporting on incident resolutions and identify changes needed for better management in the future, if necessary.

Graeme Hughes

Managing Director, TEAM Software

www.teamsoftware.com

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The post Protecting your workforce with mobile communications appeared first on City Security Magazine.

Recruitment will be a challenge into 2022 and beyond, making staff retention more important than ever. Employee engagement can be a key retention tactic for both your staff and your customers. It’s important to begin engagement from hiring and onboarding and continue it throughout your team’s career with you.

Employee engagement should always be a top priority for a security contractor. We’ve seen engagement positively correlate to job performance and fulfilment of contract SLAs.

When those things are achieved, the odds of retention – in both employee and customer contracts – increase. While this has been a long-time challenge for guards working the frontline, whose very nature of work keeps them on premises rather than in the office, generally speaking, it’s also now becoming more and more applicable to the workforce at large. Contract management and office roles are now becoming more dispersed as the option and flexibility of remote work becomes long term. As the landscape of the workforce continues to evolve, it’s important to examine engagement as a pivotal part of business strategy.

Begin with onboarding

Whilst the current hiring climate is challenging, successful engagement begins with hiring the right candidate for an open position. Do what you can to streamline your hiring process to attract applicants, but don’t forego your core criteria for the sake of filling an opening. Employees without the right qualifications or certifications, or the desire to learn, are set up to turn over quickly – some before even beginning work. That turnover is costly, especially if you don’t stop the cycle from happening again. Make sure company mission and values are easy to find and understand, and company culture is relayed accurately so that a new hire has a clear expectation for the way things are done during their tenure.

Throughout onboarding, into the first few months of work and on a regular ongoing basis post-hire, provide feedback to staff. KPIs on your contracts are directly dependent on the work your guards and contract management staff deliver. Quality of work can only improve when direct feedback is given based on what’s going well and what isn’t. And, just as personalisation and tailoring is so important to individual contracts, personalised approaches to each staff relationship should be a primary goal.

Build engagement with active staff

From a supervisory perspective, it’s important to continually engage with employees throughout their tenure with your company to counteract dysfunctional turnover – that is, when your best employees leave. Support individual interests and skills, and shape rostered tasks and shift around them.

Understanding your workforce and supporting them in achieving a schedule of work that fits to their needs and skills goes a long way, both in terms of developing a good relationship with your guards and increasing productivity. If a guard is posted to patrol a premise or event they have familiarity, certifications or affinity for, they’re more likely to produce desired results for their business and stay on.

It’s also important to value mental health as a part of the workplace. A workplace environment that develops employees’ sense of purpose and supports them through challenging times resulting in fatigue, burnout or uncertainty, plays a massive role in protecting and building good mental health.

Make it possible, where you can, for your workforce to have more control over their work experience through shift management and scheduling flexibility. Enable guards to view available shifts so they can fill gaps or swap shifts without having to submit paperwork for manager authorisation. Provide easy-to-use tools to check how team members are feeling physically and mentally, like an employee self-service portal. Use technology to your advantage when and where it makes sense to make those check-ins more reasonable.

Employee engagement is often the first step towards achieving employee and customer satisfaction. Implement strategies early on in your employee lifecycle and revisit them often to ensure minimal turnover and strengthen retention. Your future profits will be grateful you did.

Graeme Hughes

Managing Director TEAM Software

www.teamsoftware.com

The post Staff Retention in Security appeared first on City Security Magazine.

Leaders in security know your officers are your success or your failure. They’re your brand ambassadors, or they’re a liability to you.

It’s a weighty responsibility you carry through them – one you can make easier by equipping them with the right tools, training and support, so they execute the service how you need them to, and how your clients expect them to.

When thinking of the frontline officer’s tools, those which keep your guards safe and successful, it’s easy to default to the obvious. Depending on a given contract, tools can include protective or heated vests, first aid kits, flashlights or dogs. COVID-19 altered the landscape of what services a guard fulfils at a given jobsite, and with it came additional personal protective equipment inventory like masks, gloves, protective eyewear, temperature monitoring systems and disinfecting gear. But guard safety doesn’t stop at hardware – technology, specifically mobile technology, can be just as important in your overarching safety strategies.

While the possibilities of mobile technology are boundless, let’s keep it simple and stick to two main themes.

1. Mobile Technology and Communication

Dispersed workforces are just that – spread far and wide. AIs often dictate single-person or small-team tours, beats or patrols. As the nature of their work is independent and isolated, it’s important for guards to be able to send and receive communications quickly and easily no matter where they are. Mobile workforce management tools:

• Enable targeted communications to individuals or groups, depending on what message is being conveyed.
• Support duress and emergency communications and notifications.

Using smartphones, administrative staff or field-based supervisors for a long time have been able to keep guards apprised of developing situations, events, incidents, new protocols or instructions in real-time through app-based communication – and vice versa. If an incident is raised, protocols can be invoked and the necessary communications issued. This is often fully configurable. An identified network of emergency response teams, ranging from your own company leadership to the client whose jobsite is impacted, is notified depending on what protocols you’ve previously set in place, quickly and efficiently sending aid and setting into motion resolution tactics to help protect your assets in the field.

2. Mobile Technology and Guard Visibility

Just like GPS can help you monitor and navigate a safe route home in your vehicle, location tracking technologies can be used to monitor and ensure safe patrols for your guards. While the specific technology itself may vary from GPS and geo-fences to Bluetooth beacon tracking or RFID and other code-based systems depending on your client and jobsite needs, knowing when your guards book on and are onsite in realtime is enormously helpful in monitoring their safety. This kind of operational visibility supports a variety of reporting and proof of service delivery, with an added layer of protection for your guards so that:

• If an incident arises, you can dispatch resolution measures to a guard’s locationaccurate within a metre, depending on which technology has been enabled.
• You can capture incident-related data using mobile-powered rich media, creating audit trails to support compliance while pinpointing larger threats or vulnerabilities.
• Your guards are protected against false claims by using location tracking-fed reporting as evidence.

In the same manner that duress signals are an important piece of mobile technology communication, location tracking technologies can also be configured to automate alerts if a guard isn’t where they’re supposed to be. In some cases, this simply helps reinforce guard accountability, but in others, automated alerts can trigger a proactive response and status check on a guard who may need assistance.

Mobile Technology in an Evolving World

Mobile technology is inherently flexible, bringing point solutions to your guards when and where they need them the most, not the other way around. This is important as we see our world evolve, especially in the era of COVID-19. Even as vaccinations continue rolling out across the globe, COVID-19’s lasting effects will likely linger in the security industry for years to come. Monitoring guard health and safety against viral threats, and not just physical ones, may still be a challenge for the foreseeable future.

Working as an office on the front line or working from the back office with the front line will never be the same again for many organisations. Mobile technology can be used to deploy simple, accessible forms for your dispersed workforce to complete before ever stepping into an office or onto a jobsite, collecting information such as health symptoms (as your compliance regulations allow) and recording a history of responses. From there, you can mitigate risk and possible exposure for your other guards or individuals at your jobsite by managing guard shifts according to health risk.

Summary

Mobile technology isn’t new; it is how a modern, successful guarding service operates in today’s environment. Mobile technology was certainly a critical factor in helping officers – and their employers – thrive in a difficult year with evolving customer needs and jobsite expectations.

What lessons can be learned from the top performers? The world has changed. How have you prepared your business to stay relevant now and into the future? If you haven’t evaluated your mobile technology strategy lately, perhaps now is the time to do so – because your competitors already might be.

Graeme Hughes

Managing Director, TEAM Software

www.teamsoftware.com

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The post Supporting guard safety with mobile technology appeared first on City Security Magazine.