Employee Awareness Training
An employee who is trained to respond when he/she sees a security issue now becomes a defacto part of your security staff; no longer do you have to rely on the lone receptionist or security officer to be the only person who is looking out for the safety and security of your business. And dollar for dollar, Security Awareness Training is the least expensive and most cost effective solution to keep criminals at bay.
Let Secure Strategies come to your facility and conduct a seminar for your staff on topics such as:
- Security awareness
- Active shooter response
- Workplace violence reduction
- Suspicious person identification
- Suspicious package identification
- Insider threat
- and other vital subjects
We have facilitated employee trainings for as little as four and as many as three hundred staff members at a time. Our presentations are engaging, interactive and full of practical advice to make your employees part of the solution, whether the risk is internal or external.
Additionally, Secure Strategies conducts exercises and drills as another method to ensure your staff is knowledgeable and aware.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Our experience has shown that employees who are not trained in proper security practices can actually add to a company’s difficulties:
- If there is a Security Manager on staff, employees often feel that they don’t have to be concerned about suspicious behavior, visitors without escorts or other dangerous activities.
- If there is no Security Manager on staff, employees assume that “management is taking care of it.” This lack of ownership of the security function is one of the most dangerous issues facing the business. With no one assigned to secure the facility and its contents, this communicates a negligent or careless attitude towards security and is difficult to turn around without significant outside assistance.
- Unwitting employees sometimes perform dangerous practices like propping doors open to have a cigarette, and allowing strangers to “piggyback” into the office area.
- Employees falsely assume that since a visitor is now inside the facility, they must have been cleared by the receptionist (even if the visitor is missing the requisite ID badge).
- Because employees report to the same work space day after day, year after year, they become desensitized to the valuable or sensitive assets around them. For example: client records may no longer be viewed as important documents to be protected, they are just papers to be filed; that new R&D product is no longer a huge moneymaker for the company, it’s just “a boring rack of test tubes that’s preventing me from going on to the next exciting project.”
- Even the employee who does care about security for himself and the company may not know what to do when an issue arises, or may not know how to spot a security violation in progress.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
Providing employees a thorough and engaging security-focused experience allows everyone to realize that management has taken a positive step to improve the organization’s security posture, and values them and their participation. Our classes are conducted in an informal atmosphere where people can voice their thoughts, ask questions and view photographs and videos of everyday issues and solutions.
WHAT’S THE COST?
Not only is a well-educated staff beneficial to your facility security posture, training your employees is one of the most cost-effective countermeasures you can institute. The cost to educate your entire staff could be lower than you think, ranging from as little as a few hundred dollars for a brown bag lunch session to thousands of dollars for a full day seminar.
Compare this expenditure to the tens of thousands of dollars for a CCTV camera system or access control system and you can see why training is so efficient.
WHEN TO TRAIN?
Training should be conducted on a regular basis, not as a one-time event. A successful education plan might include a "Security Overview 101" class for new employees and those without security knowledge, followed by a more in-depth classroom experience targeting individual departments or functions such as Human Resources, Shipping and Receiving, the Reception Staff, Facilities, or the C-suite Executive Staff.
Security training should also be updated and conducted when facility or systems changes are imminent, so new structures, buildings and methodology can be incorporated into the security plan and passed along to staff.
