How an All-Star Officer (almost) Lost Faith in The Security Industry
I recently caught up with an old colleague of mine. We’ll call him Ben.
Ben and I both served as security officers during college. Boots shined, pants pressed and always ready to go — Ben was serious business.
It didn’t take long for Ben to rise up the ranks. Tenants would often request his attendance at their sites for his dependability and management admired his professionalism. Managers would go as far as make laminated copies of his daily activity reports for officers in training to use as reference.
Upon being promoted to Flex Officer, Ben became the go-to emergency contact for chaperoning abandoned posts (delinquent officers were a dime a dozen).
Ben was the quintessential security professional — responsible, personable and competent. And upon graduating, Ben was offered a promotion to operations manager. It was his dream come true — he started the following week.
But that’s when things got interesting.
It had been over a year since Ben was promoted and I was excited to let him know about a tool I had been working on for security teams. But before I got into that, I was curious how he was adjusting to the managerial life… it didn’t take long for my curiosity to be satisfied:
“It was when I became operations manager that it all went downhill… I was never a manager, I was a nanny.”
As operations manager, Ben was required to retrieve paper reports from all of his officer’s sites. Upon collecting the reports, Ben would begin the process of auditing in order to measure the performance of his officers. Once in his hands, reports would often be illegible, incomplete or marked up with the all too familiar, “All is clear, nothing to report”.
Being that Ben managed multiple sites, it would sometimes take up to two weeks to retrieve all of the reports. In Ben’s case that meant two weeks of officer negligence going unnoticed. As a result, Ben would have to set aside time to re-train his officers on best practices. Taking time away from his other responsibilities, Ben’s manager began to take notice.
“I began to ask my peers for help. I thought maybe they experienced this and would recommend a plan of action. You know what I got instead?
A laugh in the face.”
Ben was urged to only look through reports when necessary. This meant that unless clients requested copies of reports, he should direct his attention elsewhere.
This caused Ben to ask himself a few questions: What if a client requested a report from a negligent officer? What if officers weren’t following standard operating procedures? What if incidents were going unreported?
What if officers weren’t reporting at all?
“That was when I began to realize the problems within the security industry… management is reactive, not proactive. We wait for problems to happen before we take action— and often that results in unhappy clients and lost contracts.”
It was at this moment when I took out my phone and introduced Ben to Radar. Within a second, his face lit up. Radar allows officers to send reports via a free and secure mobile application and provides management the ability to measure officer accountability with realtime GPS activity. All reports are secured in one centralized location, ensuring easy auditing and forwarding to clients.
I am happy to say that Ben’s team is 1 of 15 exclusive private security firms that will be a part of our closed launch in August of 2016.
Interested in learning more? Click here.
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