44.312
Security Management
home page > Unit 12: summing up / study guide
No more pointing hands in this section: everything
is important and you are expected to understand all of it
to be prepared for the test
In the first half of the course we learned about the wide range of serious problems confronting the majority (but not all) of the companies in the private security field:
- low salaries and non-existent benefits
- extremely high (300% or more annually) turnover
- as a result, lack of morale and need to compete with companies such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds for poorly-educated workers.
- poor training, which means workers may not be prepared for risky situations
- lack of federal and/or state certification and/or training standards
- inherently risky work
- the potential, especially for those carrying guns, to precipitate a violent incident that, because of guilt by association, result in massive media, legal, and legislative scrutiny that could result in tight new standards and collapse of the industry as we know it.
At the same time, we learned that there are analogies, in companies ranging from coffee shops to cleaning firms, that show it is possible for individual companies to break with these historic patterns and distinguish themselves from the competition by:
- offering quality services, not just generic ones
- attract a higher caliber of applicant by offering better pay, benefits, and empowering employees
- providing training
- as a result, being able to charge a premium compared to competitors offering generic services.
In this half of the course, we learned about a wide range of the specific activities that all security companies must engage in:
- Recruitment and selection
- Training
- Motivation
- Performance appraisal
- Discipline and discharge
- Budgeting
Historically (and probably to this day in a variety of security firms), factors such as:
- the difficulty of communicating internally when that was necessarily largely limited to the phone, person-to-person meetings, and written memos and procedures
- the hierarchical, top-down, pyramidal organization structure in which senior management made most decisions and these were simply passed down to lower levels to execute -- without asking questions...
- an economy in which companies tended to pursue a given business strategy for many years with little or no deviation, and in which there were few external factors other than direct competition to force them to change those strategies
- few, if any, disruptive technologies that fundamentally challenged the status quo