There is no ambiguity when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your overall security company business; it all comes down to your profit and loss analysis. Measuring effective guard management shouldn’t be any different .
Effective security guard management is the tracking and monitoring of security guard or officer task completion and status. Tasks can include but are not limited to: open reports and outstanding or incomplete checkpoints.
In a non “Big Brother” approach to tracking and monitoring your security guards, effective guard management will ensure your team works as one unit and that sites are properly secured at all times.
In this article, we’ll discuss 2 guard activities your security team can start monitoring to start receiving the maximum benefit to your operations.
What’s Effective and What’s Not Effective? What to Measure.
To properly measure and track your security team’s activities and the completion of tasks, it’s important to measure not only the number of times your guards complete their patrols, but the amount of patrols that were incomplete or ended early due to an emergency.
Incomplete Guard Tours
Incomplete guard tours impact client satisfaction and can harm your ability to maintain contract agreements. Not to mention, when your guards don’t complete their tours, it poses a huge risk to your overall operations and to your client. Missed checkpoints, or those that were ended early or started late due to an emergency or by a guard’s tardiness, will negatively impact the success rate of completed patrols and can hurt the trustworthiness that current or future clients may have in your ability to maintain contract agreements.
Since incomplete guard tours are typically logged and tracked manually either on paper or simple spreadsheets, with the aid of guard activity monitoring tools, supervisors can receive automatic stats visualizing and quantifying the number of rounds their team has missed. This ultimately aids supervisors in proactively preventing incomplete tours from ever happening and in improving the trustworthiness clients can have toward your business.
Improper Reporting
Incident reporting is one of the most crucial parts of running a transparent security operation. For this reason, supervisors must ensure their team’s reporting is never at fault for being completed improperly or with missing or inaccurate information.
Preventing improper reporting starts with accountability. This means ensuring security guards can easily follow a step-by-step process to complete required reports, such as for client specific SOPs, and supervisors can quickly follow-up without a loss in company or client time.
Standardized reporting that’s directly accessible on a guard’s mobile device allows supervisors to effectively track and eventually measure reporting statuses. Statuses, such as reports that have been flagged as incomplete or requiring a supervisory follow-up, can be monitored with the overarching goal of eliminating outstanding tasks.
Aiming for Optimal Operational Performance
Tools, such as real-time activity tracking, are used for effective situational awareness. It’s only through a system made to visualize guard activities where security operators can properly monitor and track their guard activities.
Effective guard management relies on 2 key areas: reporting and checkpoint completion. In tracking and monitoring guard activity, you ensure your team works as a single unit while at the same time assure your clients of your ability to uphold contract agreements.
