It’s more crucial than ever for leaders to apply strategic energy

Having established the importance of a strategic alignment initiative, organizations must recognize the need for level-setting expectations with senior leaders and stakeholders, and the necessity of distilling a clear picture of exact business needs, organizational risks and cultural expectations.

Like many areas, security officer programs can evolve and expand organically as various needs are realized and other duties as assigned continue to grow. During this pandemic era, when dollars are stretched to their maximum, it is more crucial than ever for leaders to apply strategic energy in optimizing security officer programs.

Aligning with your values and mission

The second part of optimizing your security program is aligning effort around your values and mission. For example, measure where your security officers and other roles are spending their energy. As an early step, granular analytics may not be that useful. Talk with staff in other areas on operations (Ops), facilities, or building and engineering (B&E) to determine if there are potential gaps or areas of overlap in duties. For example, are B&E engineers checking areas for drips, leaks, or spills? Shifting that responsibility to security officer roves or installing water-detection sensors may be a more cost-effective choice. Likewise, are security officers expected to cover responsibilities outside their duties for which they may not be fully trained or comfortable? Employees and guests may not be aware of security officers’ assigned responsibilities and expect them to do more. Asking these probing questions may reveal interesting opportunities.

Certain non-critical or less critical services may need to be shifted to a more self-service model during these times of reduced budgets. Employees may need to be encouraged to more fully utilize available tools, such as online reporting, work-order interfaces, and guests may need to switch to self-service check-in kiosks to connect with their hosts. Security officer services require considerable annual investment and their time should be treated as valuable.

Evaluating skill levels for more efficient operations

Security officers may come with a range of skills and comfort levels for various tasks. Are all your officers equally capable of performing required tasks, or do some tasks fall to the same officers repeatedly? As an example, are all officers able to extract and share camera footage with first responders? Or would first responders need to wait for the day shift to provide that data? Evaluating your officers’ skill levels may reveal opportunities for additional training so that all tasks can be spread evenly among the team.

Finally, in some cases it may make sense to outsource certain duties or provide remote options. Remote service options may include contracting for concierge or monitoring programs, or simply enabling a single concierge to serve multiple buildings via computer interface. Focus your on-the-ground capabilities to the needs that truly require in-person presence.