Business owners should be focused on growing their enterprise and not be distracted by thankless tasks that can be automated or assigned to someone else. Smart delegation of tasks is crucial for business owner success. As a business owner in the security industry you can feel safe delegating these tasks by empowering your officers through training and easy automation.
Business owners involved in security should consider the six tasks listed in this article as tasks that can be taken off your plate. Delegate or automate. This way you can get back to those important tasks you need to focus on as a business owner. You can get back to interacting with clients, managing your employees, growing your enterprise, and paying attention to your market.
So, what should you delegate or automate?
Monitoring and Detection
Streamline your system and incorporate automation into some of the more mundane aspects of monitoring and detection to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This makes it easier to not only manage your monitoring system, it also helps keep track of personnel, clients, customers, visitors and so on.
Regardless of the size of the business that are engaging your security service, there are appropriate surveillance systems that can help you sort through data, deploy facial recognition, and upload files to the cloud. These systems can be coordinated across multiple branches and across multiple franchises if needed.
The wide variety of different options available can help you cut down on unnecessary monitoring tasks. Find a system or software platform that suits you and your business. Why use four workers to actively monitor an area when you can use technology with one worker to review the same footage?
Time and Attendance Checking
With your security personnel deployed across multiple locations, it is important to be able to effectively track attendance. Most companies still used paper based attendance registers, an inefficient and burdensome method of tracking employees. You can automate this function and use more efficient methods to monitor staff attendance and productivity.
There are now excellent time tracking systems available that alert you when staff arrive at work or their allocated post. You can set these systems to notify you, the guard or shift supervisor, and the guards themselves. No more need for inefficient and old fashioned paper and pen solutions. At Security Risk, our mobile system is easy to use and tracks guards automatically based on their login and usage of the mobile app.
Incident Response and Investigation
Responding to and reporting incidents is fundamental for ensuring a safe environment for your clients. As the business owner, this reporting often falls to you. This is unnecessary. The responsibility for reporting incidents should be delegated to the security managers or shift supervisors at each site. Only when they are unable to resolve the issue should it be escalated to you to step in and manage the client or authorities.
Effective security management platforms include incident management and reporting components that allow guards to take on reporting responsibilities while providing you with a high level overview of incidents across all sites.
Task Assignments
While delegation should be a core skill you have as a business owner, you need to be able to do this efficiently. It should not be up to you to individually task every guard at every site. Increase your efficiency and delegate to a single manager or shift supervisor who can be responsible for task allocation.
As a business owner, you know that your employees are your best asset. When you delegate you're demonstrating trust in their ability to get on with their job while you focus on growing your business. Use the resources available to upskill your guards. In Singapore, the government has set up a multitude of training programs for both guards and guard supervisors. Have a look at the WSG site for Singapore based training resources. Empower your guards with training. Better training means more confident, competent, and productive guards.
Manual Reporting
As a business owner you know how important reporting is. Reporting to the client, reporting for compliance, reporting to help understand patterns in your business. While fundamental to any business owner, it can be time consuming and at times may feel onerous. Improve the efficiency of your business and take advantage of technology platforms that allow you to automate some reporting functions.
The implementation of a holistic security management system means you will be provided with accurate data to help generate the reports you need. Most modern systems track guard attendance, patrols, and incidents. Implementing a system allows you to get real time data that you can use to report on your business performance, and keep clients happy.
Performance Management
Performance management is critical to any business owner. It helps you to allocate resources, identify gaps in performance and recognise performance success. Using existing software available on mobile apps can help you to automate some functions of the performance management process.
Implementing an automated system allows you to evaluate your own raw data to then maximise business output, increasingly important as manpower costs in Asia continue to rise.
Daily Site Attendance
A constant complaint of security managers is “I have to go down sometimes and physically find the guards to make sure they are doing their duties properly”. Security Managers slip into a routine of constantly visiting sites rather than relying on positing them to a site with a list of duties. The ability to remotely manage site patrols, send guards on scheduled and random patrols, and then monitor them in real time is critical to creating confidence with security managers and clients that the tasks that are expected on site are being completed.
Cloud based software that allows managers to see the patrols being performed is critical. Software solutions and hardware at the site needs to have a simple user interface that is not language dependant. Security Risk’s guard patrol product Sentry has a symbology driven interface that allows guards to choose commands based on easily recognisable icons. Security companies can go from training to implementation with no missed patrols within a few hours. Once these routines are established and the reports of the activity are easily available, daily site attendance can be a thing of the past and security companies can focus in on other areas of their business.
The Solution
Here at Security Risk we understand the challenges faced by businesses. We have built an easy to use, intuitive security management platform that provides automation across most functions of your business. Use the platform to remove yourself from the minutiae of the business and use your time to grow your business. Security Risk facilitates your ability to delegate or automate.