Post Orders—Key to Success or Just Unnecessary Paper?
So, are post orders key to successfully providing security guard service or just unnecessary paperwork that your clients want? Hopefully, you already know that your post orders are the foundation for successfully servicing your security guard customers. If you don’t know, check out this presentation by Brian Taylor, “Post Order Design, Development, and Implementation,” to find out why.
Although the contract between you and your client addresses topics such as when and how many officers are needed at the site, it is the site post orders that detail the specific duties that your officers should be performing. For instance, the contract may require that your security officers be responsible for monitoring and operating a magnetometer. But it is the post orders that will specify which items are considered contraband and what the officer should do when contraband is spotted.
I have always considered site post orders to be the first step toward ensuring client satisfaction. In fact, for every new security guard contract that I won, I would ask the client to name three things that our officers need to accomplish for them consider the contract successful. Whatever those three things were, I ensured that they were translated into actionable steps within the site’s post orders. As a rule, all of your clients’ expectations of your security officers should be spelled out clearly and concisely in the post orders, allowing no room for unnecessary discretion.
How Often Do You Update Your Post Orders?
Because post orders are so important, they should be considered a living document that is routinely updated and accessible by all of your security officers. As a policy, you should be reviewing and updating your post orders at least annually. If you aren’t updating your post orders regularly, it’s probably because it is an onerous task to review, update, and distribute any changes. I once had a customer tell me that he had to change one page of his post orders for four sites. After he made the change, he printed out four pages and gave them to a field supervisor to deliver. That process, including delivery, took more than FOUR hours. After hearing that story, we developed a Post Order feature for our Security Guard Reporting Software that allows our customers to upload any changes in their post orders to OfficerReports.com and distribute them to their officers instantaneously. Cool, right?
So are post orders key to your success or more unnecessary paperwork? The answer is that they are definitely keys to your success if you combine them with regular testing and frequent updates.