Again, this list is not comprehensive but provides a sense of the employer’s responsibilities with regard to OSHA regulations and guidance. It is advisable that any safety and security procedures are reviewed against specific OSHA requirements on a frequent basis to ensure that your organization’s processes meet appropriate guidelines.

Normally, small companies need not worry about hiring an internal security guard force. This is due to the significant increase in payroll and overhead costs that will accompany an internal security guard force, especially when compared to a smaller current work force. An exception could occur, whereby a small organization may need to consider hiring their own guards; this situation may exist if your organization must protect extremely high-value resources that technology and procedures alone cannot adequately protect. If there is an exorbitant cost due to any loss or damage to these critical resources, a comparison may be useful to determine whether it is advisable to hire some security guards to provide the necessary degree of added protection. If you are unsure as to whether your organization should hire an internal security guard force, it is best to accomplish a detailed cost–benefit analysis to assist you in the decision.

Location also matters in determining the type of security force that needs to be employed. If your organization operates in a high-crime area or region that experiences relatively high threats, it may be advisable to consider security guards to provide either mobile patrols or fixed positions that are permanently located within your company’s premises. The presence of these personnel not only reduces various risks against your facility and critical resources but can also provide a level of comfort to your employees in relation to a safe and secure working environment.

The last factor in helping to decide whether to staff your own internal security guards considers the specific requirements of your company, employees, and the facility in which you operate. What type of business you conduct (e.g., corporate, retail, manufacturing, storage, etc.) can affect your decision as to whether or not to use an internal security guard force. This is based on the value and criticality of the resources that you wish to protect, the willingness and ability of your employees to accomplish some additional safety and security tasks over and above their normal duties, and the amount of risk that your organization can assume based on any potential incident. We have already covered the need for some organizations, based on the critical nature of their resources, to use internal security guards. Again, this would be necessary if the value or sensitivity of an organization’s resources is so great that no loss or damage could occur without significant repercussions to the overall business operations. If your organization has been able to promote security awareness among your employees, this can also have an effect on whether or not you may require an internal security guard force. In the case of an organization that has been able to promote an exceptional level of security awareness and all employees actively detect safety and security incidents, it is likely that these efforts either augment an internal security guard force so that you can lessen the number of security personnel or offset the need for internal guards entirely. The last area to consider when looking at hiring your own internal security guard force is the amount of risk that your organization can assume in the event of an incident. Some businesses cannot allow any type of safety or security incident to occur, no matter how insignificant, without some negative impact on their operations. Schools are a prime example of this, since even a minor incident such as an unauthorized visitor that poses no danger can create a newsworthy event and cast doubt on the school’s ability to protect its staff and students. If your organization cannot allow any type of incident to occur, it is advisable to look at having your own internal guard force. By considering your own organization’s needs based on the nature of your critical resources, the level of your own employees’ security awareness, and the acceptability of some risk that could result in the occurrence of some minor safety and security incidents, you can better determine your own need to hire security guards.

There are also several advantages and disadvantages to consider, should your organization look at having your own security force. The major advantage of having internal security guards is the ability of these personnel to make decisions and immediately act to mitigate any potential emergency before the occur. A security guard can see things that cameras cannot detect, and, as such, they can immediately investigate concerns and secure an area if there is a questionable issue. Another advantage of security guards is the visual deterrent that they provide; it is difficult for any modern technology to match the impact to potential attackers and even your own employees of an on-duty security guard. Even with these advantages, the disadvantages to a security guard force are significant. A significant disadvantage is that they are costly; either by hiring the personnel yourself or by contracting the guards out to a security provider, you will incur additional costs, which can include specific equipment (such as uniforms, radios, hand-cuffs, and weapons), security guard training, maintaining the proper qualifications, and insurance. Another disadvantage is the increase in workload for other sections within your organization. In many cases; maintaining the necessary certifications, ensuring that all qualifications are met, and providing required training for a security guard force are normally going to be more detailed than that of the average employee. There are many requirements that security personnel must meet, and these items must be continually maintained and tracked—a task that can become overwhelming for smaller organizations. The last, and possibly the most significant, disadvantage of having your own internal guard force is the potential liability issues associated with these types of employees. In the course of their duties, it is likely that security guards will conduct searches of personnel, checks and searches of areas, or apprehension of individuals. In the event that these personnel are armed, they have the added potential to become involved in situations involving their firearms. All of these incidents can create significant liability concerns for your organization; as a result, it is imperative, should you decide to use internal security guards, that your organization insure itself against this liability, which will further result in additional costs along with possible legal concerns.

Now that we have looked at the various considerations, along with the advantages and disadvantages of having your own internal guard force, we will look at security guard force requirements, both for individuals who fulfill these specific duties and also for your organization as an employer of these personnel.

It should be noted that one should exercise caution when collecting many safety and security metrics. This caution is that many measurements and metrics necessitate that you have an accurate method to correctly measure the metric and that the information obtained provides a valid assessment. In other words, if there are no methods to ensure that you can adequately measure the area that you are trying to evaluate, the metric may appear to be a good measurement, but the information will fail to accurately assess the safety and security effectiveness of that particular procedure or item of equipment. An example of this would be a metric that measures the number of unauthorized entries into a company’s facility. Although the metric initially sounds good, the organization may have no method to accurately track this number (e.g., all entry ways are continuously unlocked; no access control is present at any entrance; and there is no method to identify an unauthorized individual, such as by use of employee identification badges). Thus, there is a danger in tracking such a metric, since it would likely result in very small numbers of unauthorized entries and provide a false sense of security that there is no issue within this area. Ultimately, this inability to accurately assess this security metric would likely result in taking no action to mitigate a significant risk until it is too late.

As we discussed in Chapter 3 in the section on quantifying safety and security initiatives, measuring an organization’s program can be difficult, since security measures that are working well result in no successful incidents or attacks. This can make developing and generating safety and security metrics more difficult than in other business areas—particularly since many security experts will agree that the number of attacks, either unsuccessful or successful, experienced by a company is not necessarily an indication of how secure that organization is. Instead, an organization that is the victim of an attack can be based more upon the motivation and expertise of a potential attacker, their profile or politics, the organization being in a location that is convenient for the attacker, and so forth; or sometimes a successful attack can simply be a matter of luck. Obviously, you cannot measure luck when looking at your safety and security program; however, there are some methods that can assist in developing valid measurements when trying to evaluate your organization’s program. The following steps can help to guide the process of establishing your organization’s security metrics [2]:

We will cover each of these steps over the next several sections.