As Mark Abraham, finance and IT director at Wilson James says: “There can be few things in this business more important than paying our staff the right amount of money. What else do our clients want? They want a consistent, fulfilled service, x number of hours or people. And if we are planning that in advance on a very organised and structured system, our likelihood of achieving that is greatly enhanced. And the end of the market we position ourselves at, the quality end; we have to live up to those clients’ expectations, because we set those expectations pretty high.”

Motivated

Keeping guard queries about their pay to a minimum helps to motivate staff, or putting it another way removes a possible de-motivation. Staff paid the right amount can concentrate on securing client premises, rather than firing off emails to the payroll department. “The motivation side is key, but if you are constantly paying people the wrong amount, particularly less, then clearly you are going to have a staff retention issue. We invest a lot in training in particular, so if you have a high training spend coupled with a high staff turnover, you aren’t getting a return on the investment in the training.” Or rather, as Mark Abraham adds, the training spend that your client is making. “Staff retention is something we as a board review on a monthly basis at board meetings; it’s a key driver in our business. Apart from anything else, clients like to see familiar faces; if they are seeing a lot of staff churn, they don’t feel they are getting that consistent service. If you have people who get to know clients’ locations as well, they have a depth of knowledge that goes beyond basic training.”

Rosters

Wilson James uses the online software from WorkPlace Systems, for two purposes: “First, to plan rosters within security deployments”, both in terms of planning the number of people, and making sure the properly-trained people are in the right place – for instance, staff trained in fire safety airside passed – one of the company’s clients is BAA. Once the deployment happens, the data becomes historical and can be used to create timesheets and be uploaded onto payroll, to pay people. The company’s director Stuart Lowden has for years been vocal about – to sum it up - the long-hours and low hourly pay culture of security guarding. The company does champion a work-life balance for its staff, taking the view that guards working a 42-hour week and not 60 or 72 are more alert and do a better job for clients. The rostering software is an important tool here, to see that officers are not working excessive hours by constantly volunteering for overtime.

Board report

To return to the wrong pay: besides staff feeling frustrated, there is a cost in head office staff having to make cash advances, and making corrections and re-running payrolls. It’s an important enough topic for payroll errors, too, to be reported on a monthly basis at board meetings. As the finance and IT man heavily involved in bringing in the electronic software, to do away with manual re-inputting of data, Mark points out that most staff are deployed at clients’ hundreds of locations, ‘so we are having to deploy the piece of software so that it can be accessed at client locations’. Some clients may not necessarily allow access to their network, or lower their firewall. That said, such use of technology, he suggests, does show a security company to be a technology-driven business, ‘which is a positive starting point’. That the software can transfer so much data means that a pay slip can carry a schedule of which hours are paid for at which location, at which rate, rather than showing only an overall figure for the month. So any query over pay will be a narrow one, about a particular shift, rather than a general complaint that could require a lot of work to get to the bottom of. “It’s only because we have the data integrity at the front end that you can offer the detail at the back end, the pay slip to the security worker.”

Procurement

Another IT system at the guarding firm is for procurement, if staff need to order (or re-order) uniform, radios or the other equipment needed for security work. The officer would go to the Wilson James web portal which sends the message to the in-house procurement team. Again, that means the order for a 32-inch waist or whatever isn’t re-keyed nor goes missing on the fax nor becomes altered on its journey from superviser to procurement person. Uniforms can be complicated for the guarding company which has many officers wearing client (BAA or BBC or whoever) styles rather than a Wilson James badge, let alone the male or female cuts, winter and summer styles, indoor and outdoor wear, or PPE requirements. Hence the IT that captures in the field what the officer wants – the person after all who knows what wants ordering. It’s dramatically decreased problems.