Photo by MEDIA PROFILE on Unsplash
Safely securing our offices should be an essential on all of our to-do lists given these precarious times we find ourselves in. While office security is something that can often be overlooked or neglected because of the steep costs that come with it, it’s worth taking the time to weigh up security setup costs versus the costs of losing valuable office items.
It’s also worth ensuring that our insurance policies in place provide full coverage for our most essential office items and it’s a good idea to re-assess our office assets to see if our valuations accurately reflect their current value.
Insurance is obviously a first on our list at CC&A, but we also believe it’s important to do all we can to be proactive and protect not only the security of our office assets but also the valuable lives of our employees.
We’ve drawn together an office security checklist to help with this and have found a few inexpensive ways to tighten up on protection measures.
- Conduct a security risk assessment – you can hire professionals to do this for you, get a friend to help out or ask your team to circle your office premises and look for any security weak spots that could compromise your security. For example, a weak spot could be a branch hanging over your fence that allows criminals to easily climb up and access your property. These weak spots should be the first things you attend to on your office security checklist.
- Train your staff – Have you trained your staff on what to do in the event of an armed robbery? Security drills are not just for retail outlets – every office should conduct them on a frequent basis. Pointing out all the panic buttons to your staff and training them on how to set them off discretely is a great start. You could also train them to avoid sudden movements and stay calm in the event of being held at gun point. Another suggestion is mapping out all the exits, so your staff know where the nearest escape is.
- Establish a safe room – if you haven’t implemented this practice already, it may be a wise idea to assign a safety room where all staff members keep their valuables in a locked room.
- Regularly check your alarm battery – with load shedding forever looming over our heads as South Africans, a slew of outages can put strain on your alarm battery. This is the last thing you want to fail you when danger approaches!
- Have a set office lockup routine – You should always make note of who the last employee is to leave the office and make sure that they are well versed in a strict lock up routine, which could include removing any easy-to-grab valuables away from windows and closing them all.
Although there are many more items we could add to this office security checklist, we did our best to include the most important security actions. We hope these will help you and your staff stay safe and sound at all times!