How can you make your workplace more secure?
I was recently invited by Scott Harris from Workforce Resilience to attend his “Active Armed Offender and Human Behavior Seminar” – it was a very interesting course and I wanted to share some Security tips:
- Create a “Challenge Culture”
- Wear lanyards/ ID
- Check Visitor IDs on sign-in
- Speak to your neighbors
Feedback from BCP Builder Community on LinkedIn:
A collective activity
- Effective security in your workplace, site and precinct is a collective activity. It is not just the realm of your security contractor. Make sure that you create a challenge culture in your workplace. You should be working towards an entire workforce that is proactively engaged in recognizing and reporting suspicious activities and behaviors. The main objective is to maintain the security of your key assets – People / Infrastructure / Information / Reputation.
- Security is like anything in the workplace, especially when it comes to occupational Health and Safety. It is important to have everyone on board and working to the same outcomes, which is going home safely at the end of every shift/day. Communication between everyone is important. Everyone should play a role in being interested in identifying and reporting any security or other risks they see occurring within their workplace. It may even be the auto doors are taking too long to shut etc, it does not have to be anything too difficult.
Challenge Culture
- I am often dismayed by the lack of challenge in business environments. I recently struck up a conversation with a retail security officer who happily told me all sorts including that they used WhatsApp to share sensitive data and it was administered by the local police! They then went on to bemoan:
- The lack of training from their employer
- How the management at the large retailer they were working for didn’t support or engage them
- How none of the staff were interested in loss prevention
- Loss prevention was deemed to be the security officers sole responsibility so they feared for the security of the business when they weren’t on duty.
- After a lovely ten minute chat, they finally got round to asking “who are you by the way?”!
- Some people really love to chat and you learn a lot from listening.
Emergency Notification System
- The reason I believe so many organizations use WhatsApp is due to a lack of knowledge about what they can or can’t do to securely share data. It’s all well and good saying that you’re trying to do the right thing but if the Information Commissioner’s Office came knocking then there’s going to be little you can do to avoid what will follow.
- There’s a lot of third party security officers and businesses trying to do business crime reduction on the cheap. The problem with cheap is that it’s not always the best option. The South West Business Crime Centre are currently working with lots of Business Improvement Districts, Police and Business Crime Reduction Partnerships to make sure that they’re not exposing themselves to these kinds of risks. Once you start lifting a few rocks, it’s amazing what you discover.
- Unfortunately, people that don’t either know or understand security issues have the ear of management. Cost or lack thereof is often a selling point, not how secure the application may be. I deal with a number of organizations that use the consumer version, not the commercial or managed services version of an app.
If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.
