There are lots of good reasons for wanting to protect a business against intruders and safety is probably the most obvious one. A less obvious, but equally valid, one is to save money, not just be reducing the likelihood of disruptive incidents but in more visible ways such as reduced insurance costs.
With that in mind, here are some tips from Adrian Rickersey; Sales Office Manager at Newgate, on security measures which are viable for small businesses and what impact they could have.
Secure your perimeter (if you can)
Many small businesses will be operating out of rented property, in which case they will need to rely on their landlords to take care of the external access to the property.
For those small businesses who do own their own property, the automatic gate system is now at a price point where they are within reach of even SMEs, and in addition to enhancing safety, they can also enhance productivity.
In short, electric gates can be monitored and operated remotely meaning that your staff can get on with other tasks in other locations rather than needing to stay near the gate (or keep people waiting).
NB: all small businesses can and should take ownership of basic security precautions like ensuring windows are closed and locked when the building is not in use.
Keep a record of who is in the building, where (and why)
Businesses, even small ones, should be doing this anyway so that they can evacuate effectively in the event of a fire. However, in the real world, many smaller companies still rely on team leaders knowing where their team members are. This can be successfully implemented by issuing ID badges to your employees that you can easily have printed from websites such as https://instantcard.net/.
Addressing who is in the building at any given time gives businesses a great opportunity to review their working processes and take steps to ensure that access to different areas is granted on the basis of need rather than by default.
This brings several benefits, not only does it make it much easier to evacuate safely, it also makes it easier to see who could be responsible for any issues (and relieve suspicion from staff who are not responsible) and makes it harder for intruders to enter the building in the first place.
Invest in CCTV and a good, sensor-driven alarm system
CCTV and alarms are both decent deterrents on their own, but they really work best when partnered together.
A business should have reliable commercial security alarm systems of varied components. CCTV is only as good as the people monitoring it and without constant vigilance, people can slip past it. Alarms are automated, so they don’t require continual human oversight, but they only have any real meaning when they cause a human to take action and these days it is very unwise to rely on the police hearing an alarm and coming to investigate.
The chances are that they will only attend the scene if someone calls them and tells them that an alarm is going off and ideally that someone should be working for the company and able to confirm that the alarm is genuine by checking the CCTV system. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that alarms do not have to make a noise. Audible alarms may have an intimidation factor and may scare criminals into leaving the scene, but this is not guaranteed and they can be disruptive, especially if they go off at night in residential neighbourhoods.