Continuing a series on how the private security industry may change due to Covid-19 lockdown pandemic response. Previously, we asked how security and loss prevention managers might have to change ways of thinking, besides ways of working, if home became for at least part of the working week the place of work. How then to spot staff fraud, for instance.
Work from home, has already become WFH for short. The work of a workplace security manager has always been two-sided; not only to watch for wrong-doing, but to protect staff against others, whether robbers, tiger-kidnappers, or angered, aggressive customers. If a woman who works as a call handler is assaulted by her partner, if that woman is now working from home due to lockdown, is that domestic abuse; or violence in the workplace?
That worker from home – what of the precautions taken in a call centre, such as requiring staff to lock away their phones, so that confidential data is not captured with a snapshot and made use of? How can the employer be sure that a clean desk policy is enforced? If a worker’s partner and children have access to the home office, should they be vetted as a risk as much as the worker?
And that confidential paperwork is not copied, or if it ever is, it’s shredded when no longer wanted? It’s straightforward enough for an IT asset disposal and shredding contractor to send a lorry to a workplace to pick up IT equipment and shredded paper to destroy securely; how to do that when staff are spread across a city or a region?
New ways of working must inevitably arise from social distancing. At first, businesses with offices and back-up offices alike shuttered (something seldom imagined in business continuity exercises) for many weeks, have carried on, due to necessity and a shared sense of mission in adversity. They have also been able to draw on ties from having worked in the same physical office. Over time, staff will leave or retire, and new staff will join without those formal and informal ties.
Yes, HR can carry out pre=employment screening, and staff induction or other training online. All businesses will have to work out what processes they judge can be carried out remotely (and thus more cheaply all round – no staff travel costs, less office space required). Or, to use a word already so much used it’s becoming a cliche, businesses will become ‘agile’, hiring office space if they feel they need to do face to face interviews of prospective staff, or for more important training. Whatever’s judged less important can be done online, at the cost of losing the nuances picked up from ‘face to face’; pauses, shuffles in seats, a repeating of the question to nervously gain time.
If office and service sector work becomes less face to face, security managers, having to abide by rules, may have to change the ways they work. For example, will they be able to carry out loss prevention investigative interviews, face to face, or rely instead on video inquiries, without being able to use the psychological pressures as set out in the Wicklander-Zulawski (W-Z) training and the great counter-fraud investigator Mike Comer’s book Deception at Work; such as pushing across the table to the suspect an incriminating file or document; does the suspect push the paper away or avoid facing it? That applying of pressure – the suspect having nowhere to escape physically – is not an option on Zoom.
Just as much will remain the same, whatever changes due to the pandemic – cyber-attacks, activist protest – so investigative interviewing will have to be carried out, against wrong-doing in the workplace – not only of theft from the employer, but of safety transgressions. As W-Z have pointed out, private or police interviews run the ‘dangers of implicit promises of leniency, lack of representation and fact-feeding resulting in a contaminated confession’. Which can arise from a confrontational interview whether face to face or done on Zoom or other software package, which aims at a confession rather than the truth.
