I’ve written previously about the need to embrace our corporate or institutional culture and the language of business into enterprise physical security. All too often, we practical folks engaged in the day-to-day operations of our departments dismiss these concepts as superfluous or mere hoops to jump through to please some higher authority. As I’ve been known to preach about, regularly, is the need to market our services to our customers, both internal and external.  One “corporate speak” method of marketing our work with the value added benefit of guiding our decision making is in the form of value statements.

I won’t attempt to write a primer on writing value statements here. There are numerous sources of information available for doing that. Simply put, a value statement is an expression of your core beliefs. They can be as simple as words to the effect of, customer service is job one.  That would be too simple of a statement in our business, in my opinion, but I hope that you get the idea. These are typically expressed along with mission statements and the like. Again, I won’t go into all of that here.  What I will go into is this: put yourself in the place of someone who uses their card to access spaces in your facility and/or one who enters through a staffed ID checkpoint. What would you value? If you can’t envision too many examples, just ask a few of your customers who use these services.