Have you ever taken over a contract and your new client tells you that there are no post orders? Well it’s happened to me before and most of the time I think to myself, well I can understand why the other security guard company wasn’t successful. Let’s talk about the importance of security guard post orders.
I previously did a blog on the importance of post orders, but today I’ll be talking about how I set up my company’s post orders when I was selling security guard services. First and foremost there isn’t one “Right” way to set up your post orders, but there are some things that I think all post orders should contain.
The first thing that I think should be included in your post orders comes from your initial conversations with your new customer. You have to include the goals that your customer is trying to achieve by hiring you to provide their security services.
Include Your Customer’s Goals in Your Security Guard Post Orders
In many cases, your customer’s goals won’t be something that your customer readily provides to you. They will often have to be things that you extract from them by asking a lot of questions. For example, if one of your customers is the head of security at a hospital, she may be evaluated on patient satisfaction surveys. Consequently, your customer is going to be very focused on customer satisfaction. As the contracted security provider, you have to ask yourself what can you do to assist her in ensuring that customer satisfaction is always high?
Maybe, your post orders require that rather than telling visitors where to go, your officers provide an escort to that location. Or maybe your officers provide a map to the visitor and highlight the best route to get to that location. Again, whatever your customer’s goals are, you have to attempt to tie those into the post orders.
Constructing Your Post Orders
I had a couple of templates that I used over the years to help me streamline my post order process. Here is a link to one of my older post order templates for your reference. Please keep in mind that it’s the only one I could find, so don’t be too critical.
For my post orders, I would break them up into several sections, each of which would be inserted into a plastic document sleeve. The first page always dealt with emergency procedures, followed by a table of contents, a site introduction that explained why we were there, and a facility map. After that, the post orders got into procedural documents and all of the associated forms.
After you’ve set up that beautifully crafted and thought out set of post orders, the real work begins. So why do I say that? Well, that’s because those post orders are only as good as your training, updates, and measurement against post orders.
Training On Your Post Orders
Every officer that works at one of your client’s sites has to be trained well enough on your post orders so that they can achieve all of the goals that you outline within the post orders. After all, what good is it for your post orders to instruct your officers to pass out a map to the hospital visitors and highlight the best route if your officers haven’t been trained on where anything in the hospital is?
Ensure that when your field supervisors or site supervisors are doing the training that they also have a full understanding of the post orders themselves. That training should also be documented and retained for your records.
Updating Your Post Orders
I think that most of you would agree, the hardest part about post orders is updating those post orders as necessary. Your post orders have to be a living document that changes with the requirements of the site. When the procedures for the site need to change, ensure that you get your post orders updated and revised as soon as possible. If your security guard management software has a post order feature like OfficerRepors.com’s it will make your job a lot easier.
Last, and most important, is ensuring that you can measure how well your officers are following those post orders and being able to discuss those successes with your customer. If your officers are passing out maps, ensure that they are capturing those actions on their Daily Activity Reports (DAR) or some type of “maps handed out report” that you can share with your customer. Again, if you are using security guard management software that allows for customization of your Daily Activity Reports, like OfficerReports.com, this should be a fairly easy process.
Those are my secrets for putting together high-quality and functional post orders for your sites. Is there anything else that you would include in this list or something that I got wrong? If so, please feel free to leave your comments below.
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By Courtney Sparkman
OfficerReports.com is a software company that provides security guard companies with an easy way to monitor their officers, better manage their operations, and win new business. Take a tour of our software to see how we combine Electronic Reporting, Real-Time GPS based Tour Tracking, and GPS based Clock In and Out into one easy to use platform.
