The Risk Mitigation through Innovative Tools and Human Adaptability to Change
Resilience is based on trust. Fundamentally, the level of trust is tested in hard times when individuals and teams have to prove their strength and ability to react. These attributes become critical when we are talking about risk mitigation.
Over the past years we encountered pre-pandemic challenges, at that time considered manageable variables. During sanitary crisis or any other unexpected crisis with steep evolution, the availability of human resources and continuous adaptability to rapid changes can determine the effectiveness of security incident management. The service providers in security industry and specifically the ones who are covering monitoring business should meet and adapt continuously to external and internal challenges during peace or critical times. Flexibility, scalability, and adaptability should be mandatory attributes of modern management strategy.
Cost optimization is part of ruling model to support adaptability applied on the whole supply chain. Over the last 2 years, security incidents were growing and the top answer was supply chain issues (at nearly 39%) followed by reduced business hours.
At the end of 2021, market surveys found that businesses are experiencing a rise in physical security incidents, with 28% of respondents reporting an increase, up from 20% of respondents in last year’s survey. Many respondents don’t see this changing for the better in 2022, with nearly 27% stating they expect incidents to continue to grow this year. And yet, even in the face of steadily escalating security concerns, the majority (nearly 57%) said their security strategies haven’t changed at all.
Examples from real life highlighted the threat of having dedicated personnel for specific security installations, people dependent procedures, difficult to replace a person from a security monitoring procedure due to his/her experience and being too familiar with local so-called habits and/or unwritten rules or procedures.
Technological evolution to digital processes in security industry has its own adoption curve depending on how agile, lean, or profitable are the security operations.
The strength of a team through its team members and their ability to react in mitigating or addressing the risks using modern and innovative tools defines my today topic.
When Do Crisis Appear?
According to the International Monetary Fund, labor shortages have pushed up wage growth, benefitting low-wage workers but adding to inflation risks. Bringing more workers back into the labor force would ease these pressures while making the recovery more inclusive.
The Eurofound research agency’s overview of minimum wage increases in 2021 during COVID-19 pandemics finds lower increases than in 2020 but still with six countries in Central and Eastern Europe – Latvia, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania – increasing rates by over 5%. Increases of 1%-5% were recorded in 11 Member States while rates were frozen in Belgium, Spain, Greece, and Estonia. However, the cross-sector negotiations in Belgium recently included a commitment to increase the minimum in stages over the next six years. The median increases in 2021 across Europe at 3% is well below the 8.4% figure for 2020. By late 2021, there were 50 percent to 80 percent more unfilled jobs in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States than there were prior to the pandemic. Open vacancies were at or above their 2019 levels in other advanced economies too and have risen steadily across all sectors, including those that are more contact-intensive, such as hospitality and transportation. Increases in vacancies have been largest for low-skilled jobs.
Matching unemployed workers to job openings is more difficult now than in the early phase of the recovery due to the exhaustion of worker recalls, increasing skill gaps in particular occupations and a closing employment gap. Wage increases in 2021 thus far are concentrated in low-wage service jobs which experienced the highest COVID-related losses. But labor shortages constantly appear, even without a crisis, it’s a matter of how we address it.
Published last year in the US by a leading company from our industry, a recent survey about smart security trends in 2021 highlighted the introduction of staffing challenges. This is likely a combination of several factors, including COVID-related staffing issues and the need to facilitate remote security operations for staffers. To ease these challenges, security and facility management professionals should consider solutions that enable them to monitor and respond to security alerts from anywhere.
It’s important to understand that in the background of personnel fluctuation, ascending and descending curves in evolution of wages and economic downturns, innovation is always happening. Before the health crisis or the current geopolitical conflicts, there were always problems and there are always solutions to them. No matter what situation our industry is facing, we must continue to grow and strengthen our business model using our workforce, our tools, and our organizational culture.
For our industry, it is very important to consider the workforce needed to manage and operate the security systems and to be able to adapt to critical situations. The strength of a chain is given by the weakest link. Ideally, we should rely on equally trained, highest level of skills of security workers. Ideally! This is not an achievable target in normal conditions, not to mention during various types of crises.
Industry Skills Gap
Enterprise Security is a distinct and sophisticated profession requiring a unique set of competencies and skills for success. Roles in this industry are not a subset or “spin-off” of the criminal justice system. Nonetheless, not all academic and training programs with “security” in their title offer an education with consistent, current, industry-aligned competencies and employability skills. This complication in education contributes to the growing security industry skills gap.
The workforce is also aging, which leads to further shortages of qualified workers, and creates the need to strengthen the industry’s talent pipeline. These dynamics and the absence of industry-endorsed solutions contribute to large talent deficits that may weaken the security infrastructure of organizations, enterprises, and the larger global economy.
How Important is Skillfulness in your Workforce?
Induction of the workforce is a time-consuming process. It must be thoroughly followed by the learning process in order to fill all the white spots of the employee. That’s because any small misinterpretation or misunderstanding could lead to an incident that affects the business continuity and operator liability. It is very important in critical situations to focus on the time which an employee needs to start the job, to maintain a clear level of proficiency in your workforce, and to preserve the business continuity of the operation of the security systems.
Human Adaptability to Change, Skill or Ability?
What is Adaptability?
Adaptability is a person’s ability to adjust to changes in their environment. When thinking about your career aspirations, changes have a direct effect on how flexible you can be. Practicing adaptability may include how you are able to respond quickly to changes, for example, work processes that increase efficiency, and improve or maintain excellent customer service mean a changed way of operating.
Are you flexible and willing to learn? Do you accept change at work in a positive manner? Are you able to try new things and handle different workflows? If so, you show adaptability, one of the most highly sought-after skills.
Adaptability is important because as new technology evolves, companies established in the “old ways” may have difficulty competing with major players in their industry.
Adaptability as a skill refers to the ability of a person to change his actions, course, or approach to doing things in order to suit a new situation.
So here we are in front of the question: Can innovation compensate for the shortage in workforce and human adaptability to change? Definitely yes, but we must understand that the right term is “compensate,” not “replace.”
Acknowledge – Validate – Solve or Escalate to Closure
These are the most common steps of a physical security standard operating procedure in incident management. Early adoption of new tools, sharing data, and ensuring full knowledge of all aspects of a situation as it evolves should be considered key elements of security monitoring process performance.
Should these elements be dependent or independent on human knowledge and skills? Are only abilities enough to perform it?
To execute on operational efficiency, the team needs to follow standard procedures and actions when it comes to security incident management. Managers should evaluate and review on a regular basis the entire chain of the security management system, its procedures, and vitality. Also, reports of incidents, the results from security events and trainings, audit database, as well as other relevant documents and data should be reviewed. Not the least, best practices from the industry should be considered in the continuous effort to elevate the security system.
How Can We Lead Resilience in Crisis Situations?
The risk mitigation through innovative tools and human adaptability to change
Innovation is the only way to evolve and address new challenges. Today we can address risks through innovative tools which help human adaptability to change.
The risks we can prevent and mitigate are related to human resource challenges presented earlier and adaptability to new procedures, ways of operations, and new systems.
During the pandemic crisis, a US research report showed that the top physical security technology goal for 2021 was better integration between security and other systems. Over 60% agreed that integration was the most important goal for them in 2021. This result highlights the fact that security operations need to be more centralized and efficient to manage.
From an operational perspective, we need a standardized process. The operator does not have to remember all the necessary steps, but the tools must help him, must guide him and keep him on the right track. This will avoid routine mistakes and help the operator to focus on critical decisions.
Based on service providers’ experience and recent developments to centralize more systems, we have identified three major processes which can be easily addressed with the latest software tools:
- Easy navigation on video resources
- Process automation to eliminate routine and to increase accuracy
- Workflow process for incident management
The first one is related to the impressive amount of data generated by video monitoring, incident validation, and operational monitoring. Easy navigation and access to information in a native way, a human-friendly user interface, can offer the operator access to “heavy” information without great effort.
InFieldOfViewControl tool can be the most powerful feature you can have to track a suspect on camera or simply move from one camera to another.
The challenge: operators don’t know by heart where the nearest camera is or its exact position.
With video overlay, you have the possibility to click on a control inside your video stream that shows the nearest camera, either with a camera icon or a video thumbnail. No interruptions, seamless and fast tracking!
Would it be nice to have these things connected? In large and complex video systems, a new operator does not know the positioning of the cameras, the navigation mode, and Video Overlay can be a help for the operator in the process of assessing an incident, without having the knowledge of the topology or geography of the place.
The second one is about process automation through scenarios to eliminate routine, manual processing and increase operations accuracy.
What if the management system innovative tool is able to implement scenarios for these operations? Then the system will apply the programmed scenario and the operator will only be notified in case of deviation. A good example can be an automated check on intrusion arming status at a specific time. Or to introduce a vigilance sequence or virtual video guard tour to operators during the night shift?
A scenario should be triggered automatically from whatever action you want: card swiping, door open too long, fire detector triggered, or manually from the user interface by an operator.
Simple and easy setup with basic boxes:
- Loop
- Condition
- Action
- Exit scenario
It’s a real helper for recurring events, time saved on operations, and creates independence on human-based decision or actions.
The third one is standard operating procedures through workflows. The need is to eliminate arbitrary decisions from operators, create false hierarchy on event processing, generate chaos on reaction, lack of knowledge about incident evaluation, misleading reaction and create a human-dependent process.
A workflow gives the operators the steps to follow when an alarm/incident occurs regardless of the origin of it, can be physical security as well as a cyber incident or facility infrastructure related.
It should help operators to react and act according to predefined and specific procedures and processes, to create a report, add attachments for later review, or escalate the alarm.
Workflows should be triggered only when an alarm is acknowledged by the operator.
This method of alarm management is very useful for critical response time (e.g., intruder alert, cyber incident, or flooding the data room).
Conclusion
When we are considering the human factor and the impact it has on security incident management, there are a lot of elements to consider. Variables are the sole constant in the equation involving workforce. Personnel fluctuation, temporary lack of resources due to various motives, lack in their training, shortage of skills, lack of adaptability—these are only a few points in the long list of issues that companies are confronting. We had a look over the impact on the effectiveness of security incident management and how software tools can compensate for the shortage in workforce and at the same time enhance and elevate the security incident management systems.
Nowadays, in the security services sector, companies cannot afford to train an employee for a month-long period. Time pressure is huge, just like in any other business area. The trainee should be capable to execute security tasks after a brief training session, condensed in hours or a couple of days tops.
This is one of the reasons why innovative tools should be implemented in order to compensate for the disruptions generated by the human factor.
Automated solutions and scenarios, standard execution procedures comprised in workflows, as well as intuitive and easy-to-understand navigation systems based on video must be evaluated and approached.
Business continuity is not just a desire, it is a critical factor for every organization. Every small security breach has a massive potential impact in data loss and operational freeze, which is equal to business, clients, and money loss. Certain solutions must be implemented in order to maintain business continuity and to reduce the company’s costs related to training, human error, and other threats.
Summarizing, the two important elements of a security system—workforce & technology—are tied together, and each one brings limitations in covering all the tasks required.
That is why there is a continuous need for improvement on both sides. But where should we put our focus? On a system with independent features or functionality dependent on a skillful workforce?