4 Employee Security Protocols to Safeguard Your Business

How technology, managed services, and smart procedures can protect your business

Running any business is a complex, difficult endeavor, further complicated by making sure that you have sufficient security in place to guard your assets. Instituting effective employee protocols and other security measures can keep your organization protected against theft, intrusion, and more threats that impact the bottom line. Here are four interventions to consider:

1. Video surveillance and intelligent video monitoring

One step to ensuring that your employees are doing their jobs correctly, especially when you’re off-site, involves monitoring them at work. Knowing that they’re on video will greatly decrease the chance that workers steal, embezzle, commit fraud, violate safety policies, provide poor customer service, or engage in other illegal, unprofessional, or unethical behaviors. Additionally, monitoring employees can allow you to spot the most productive and hard-working individuals and reward them with promotions, bonuses, or additional benefits.

Surveillance is also essential to discouraging or spotting theft in businesses that have a high level of client or customer foot traffic, such as retail establishments. In a survey of just 25 major retailers in 2015, 1,170,056 shoplifters were apprehended, recovering $150 million in stolen goods. When effective surveillance is combined with alert employees, this theft can be mitigated and often stopped cold.

Video surveillance can be extremely effective, but it can be difficult to monitor feeds all the time – and it’s often prohibitively expensive to pay security staff to review your security cameras every minute of the day. That’s just one of the reasons why remote monitoring and intelligent video analytics have become popular among business owners. Remote monitoring uses off-site staff to efficiently and effectively review your video feeds. And intelligent video monitoring software can detect threats and suspicious behavior to alert you or on-site security or management staff when a potential threat to the integrity of your business has been identified.

These services act as a security force multiplier, allowing you to hire fewer personnel and focus on what really counts – running a profitable and successful business.

2. Effective sales and inventory tracking

Even with a competent security staff and a powerful video monitoring system, businesses (especially retail ones or those with valuable physical inventory) are constantly at risk for theft from both customers and employees. For U.S. retail businesses alone, employee theft counts for 43% of all lost annual revenue from theft, adding up to approximately $18 billion per year. This is why you may want to purchase a specific sales and inventory tracking system for your business that can help prevent inefficiencies and lost profits, as well as make it significantly more difficult for an employee to steal cash or inventory without being detected.

3. Education, smart policies, and company culture

While technology and security protocols are vital components of creating a more secure business with more disciplined employees, true security begins with the employees themselves. Creating smart policies that reward good behavior and discourage bad behavior, as well as an in-depth employee education process, go a long way toward helping employees become allies, not adversaries, in ensuring a more secure company.

Additionally, it’s often the simple rules and policies that can have a big effect. Seemingly little things, such as remembering to lock doors, activate alarms, or consistently remove cash from registers or company safes can have a serious impact on overall security and help deter incidents of theft, trespassing, vandalism, and violence on company property.

4. Smart information policies for remote workers

More and more companies are allowing employees to work remotely, making it a priority to have smart security policies regarding confidential company information. For example, if company workers are allowed to work remotely, you may want to mandate that they use a secure company laptop to work – or at least one updated with specific security programs and protocols. You may also want to institute other information security rules, such as prohibiting your employees from accessing work networks and checking work email on unsecured public networks, or using unknown USB drives to transfer data to and from devices that have been used to access sensitive company data.

To learn more about ways to keep your business safe, whatever your industry and concern, turn to POM Technologies. We are a full-service security integrator that looks at all of the unique aspects of your organization to devise solutions that are efficient, powerful, and simply make sense. Call us at 212.688.2767 or reach out through our online form for a free consultation.