The security of your estate property or company property (campus, mall, warehouse, hospital, retail store, etc) is an intelligent alliance between your security guard provider and you or your company managers. The totality of security is inclusive of excellent security officers who are highly trained and expertly responsive and how the company itself (or the personnel on a private estate) is administrated in terms of policy and response to untoward or criminal events. These two elements, the security team and the company or family team work together across all expressions of best performing protection for property and people.
This approach of company response is summed up in the 4 P’s: Policy, Procedure, Plan, Practice.
- Policy — a critical factor of your company’s security approach is exploring and creating written policies that include all compliance and regulation measures (fire safety for instance, or earthquake safety) that are general or industry specific. Policies concerning security should be written out and express perceptions, beliefs, cultural values and do’s and don’ts. This includes responsibilities to customers and to employees.
- Procedure — take your policy to “how you carry it out” which is procedure. This is the day to day, hour to hour outline and detailed instructions for carrying out security policies inside the company and as it relates to customers or other vendors or law-and-order entities. This includes entry and exit to buildings, visitor procedures, protection of private information, incident reporting and response, end of day checklists.
- Plan — What you do when an incident actually occurs is the plan. It outlines and details the response to untoward, unknown, unexpected or criminal intent activity. There could be multiple plans depending on the events planned for. Critical to the plan is the speed with which a decision needing to be made gets to the decision-maker, the right person with the right authority to decide. This called an escalation path. Plans include the relocation of people to safe areas, and the entire flow of how this procedure is handled so all managing of people involved is done calmly and professionally.
- Practice — The art of the drill is the final capstone to company or estate security. Policy, Procedure and Plan need to be practiced in detail, and in simulation of the event or emergency. Plans that are written out require realistic walk-throughs ensuring that everyone involved is familiar with their responsibilities, procedures and contingency plans. It also helps to identify problems in the response or areas that are not well addressed yet. Creating a training curriculum is part of this final step. Don’t let the security measures and responses become stale by not having practices. Keep everything fresh.