Thanks to good and visible work by private security during the Covid-19 pandemic, it may be possible to celebrate the sector’s work – but it will be harder to put that across to the public than to security users, it’s suggested.
In yesterday’s webinar by Prof Martin Gill, the three speakers came from different continents – Australian Security Industry Association Ltd (ASIAL) chief Bryan de Caires; in the United States, Michael Gips, a board member of the Global Life Safety Alliance; and in the UK, former BSIA chairman and Security Industry Authority (SIA) board member, now a non-exec of several companies, Geoff Zeidler.
Peter French raised the question that while security officers in the UK were designated ‘key workers’, some of them were also on zero hours contracts and low pay. Geoff Zeidler replied that the only way to rectify that, is through the customers; it’s for those managing contracts and security companies to argue for recognising the services given, and benefits to the customer, to get staff better paid. He admitted that zero hours are ‘a real challenge’ and that change – to show private security as an aspirational sector to be in, that draws more talent – is not to happen overnight.
Giving the Australian angle, Bryan de Caires said that pay was a ‘complicated area’; labour rates, whether casual, part-time or full-time, were set nationally (for several officer levels). Some operators, he said, will try and under-cut others; and the guard at the bottom tends to get the raw deal. If you look after your staff, you hopefully get better clients, because they value the quality, he suggested. He offered a difference between the contract guard sector’s ‘price makers’, whether to government or corporates; and the ‘price takers’. Local government, he went on, are some of the worst offenders (in terms of low pay and hence low quality of officer) because of local government trying to get value for money; but not at the cheapest price and the ‘race to the bottom mentality’, he added.
Geoff Zeidler spoke of how it is possible to show value to a specific customer, ‘because security is all situational’. Not so, he went on, to a wider audience, maybe not as well-informed, and to whom maybe a security service is invisible, or only visible when something has gone wrong. Bryan de Caires said that perceptions of security were rooted in the past; and there was not a coherent industry strategy to explain its work and value; because Security just gets on and does it. “What the industry does do effectively is celebrate its win,” Bryan said.
Before and during the pandemic, technology gave an opportunity to innovate security, Zeidler said. The trouble is, he added, that a client looks through a manned guarding schedule and argues about five per cent; and that 5pc is where the management expertise is lost. Do something innovative for a customer, and managers will find money to pay for it. While Zeidler said that he had met some really impressive people offering such innovation, there’s not enough of them.
While the three men in an hour’s webinar could not give answers to such thorny questions as how to demonstrate value to customers and how to raise officer pay, they did set out how (as Bryan de Caires put it), while not everything is rosy, ‘what we have seen over the last three months is that the industry does a great job and does a lot we need to be proud of.’
The webinar chaired by Prof Martin Gill of consultancy Perpetuity was part of a series under the banner of the OSPAs (Outstanding Security Performance Awards). For past and future webinars visit https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
