Utilizing employees for security measures?
My company currently is lacking on all security measures, and its something I have been pushing for but due to budget constraints it's been difficult. We deal with the general public and have many issues with intoxicated customers.
We have a handful of employees who are trained in de-escalation and have been previously employed by law enforcement. Is it a liability to utilize these employees to deal with aggressive customers (if they're comfortable with it) in lieu of having security guards, it is obviously outside of their assigned job duties. But we're looking for short term options. Wondering if this is a bad idea.
Comments (3)
I would consult your legal department on this if you have one. At a minimum, if you're having employees do collateral duties as security, I would ensure you clearly outline their duties and responsibilities, properly review that with them, ensure they are 100% comfortable with it, then, if so, develop the appropriate SOPs and training.
Verbal de-escalation is one thing, but not all situations can be de-escalated by talking, so what happens if the situation becomes physical and this non-security person gets injured or even killed from an intoxicated customer or anyone else? Definitely a liability here and need to fully evaluate all options. If the people were previous LEOs, then that's one thing (but would still need to fully detail their expected duties and responsibilities, develop written SOPs, etc.), but if you're considering using people who have no prior law enforcement or legitimate security experience, I would recommend consulting your legal department to see if it's even a risk you want to accept.
If it's outside of their assigned job duties then no, they should not be doing it.
If you want to change their job description and that is agreed upon by the employees, HR, legal, and anyone else who might have a say, then sure, you can do that.
We're a hospital and deal with the public. We see well over 1,000 physically violent or verbally aggressive people each year. It's actually our leading cause of injury. Even though we have 24/7 contract security as well as an 18 person uniformed police force, they cannot be everywhere all the time, and even a 3 minute response time is a lot when someone is getting pummeled.
Most of our patient facing staff has one of several levels of training, ranging from de-escalation to physical techniques. We use these folks to do the training and several of our staff are in-house trainers.
https://www.crisisprevention.com/Our-Programs
Cameras even if they are cheap ones from amazon.