We don’t just write this software at AXLR8. We go to shows, concerts, matches, bars, shops, sports stadia and participate in big sports events. We always meet helpful staff from the great companies like CSP, Wise Security, Just Protect It and Main Event. They are knowledgeable, responsive, polite and friendly in all weathers. Often they are doing a grunt job in a rainy car park or marshalling or in-store. Some of the smartest we deal with are doing night shifts in a warehouse testing new versions of our app whilst graduating in something clever.
How do those companies build great staff and reputation? The answer is because the owner probably started out with a definition of the quality they wanted to attain. Everyone that joined stepped up to meet that standard. Then, even more difficult, the standard had to me monitored, maintained and improved.
Tom Peters in his book “In Search of Excellence” put it succinctly when describing how MacDonalds had grown hundreds of times bigger than any other fast food chain. To paraphrase: “Everyone can serve food. MacDonalds somehow keep everything spotless”. That was true for more than two decades, at least! It is about attention to detail and constant monitoring.
Systems and Smiles
Here is a big claim:
“Most guards and security staff and safety stewards improve performance for employers using AXLR8 systems!“
Oh yeah? How is that possible?
Common sense really. Below are a few real life examples we have seen from companies using our system. They are from companies that really care about the staff reflecting their companies’ quality standards. It is because they care about their clients and the public safety they protect. They treat their clients’ assets as their own. They do the hard miles to build a great business and systems are at the core of managing continous improvement.
Select the best
Using AXLR8 Applicant Tracking System, you can create enjoyable candidate journeys. At the same time, you can accept the best people and leave the poor applicants for your competitors. In addition to selection for the attributes your company demands, you can use AXLR8 for vetting to BS7858 to check the claims during the application process. The AXLR8 system can filter out applicants who have no right to work, are under age or do not have the industry certification you require.
e-Learning
Using AXLR8, Guards are not just scanning over safety and quality policies and client requirements. They are being tested by their employers. This means the trouble is taken to ensure all is learned and understood. Good employers take that trouble and it is appreciated by clients and staff alike. One of our clients ensures their staff undergo an eight-stage training programme on a single client venue. There are tests before you enter the next stage of training so eight quizzes in all. We built the training programme together. It has been successful for several years which means the staff know what to do and how to advise visitors no matter how unusual the situation. This raises their confidence and authority and builds the confidence for members of the public.
Proof of attendance
Punctuality is fundamental to your contract with the client. So, staff attendance must be managed. Check-ins get people there on time. Check-outs allow you to see if people leave early.
People who might other wise have arrived late or left early will know they cannot get away with it any more. All our clients document this with the staff in their Ts & Cs and make sure they too are concerned observe better punctuality.
This is a very important customer retention matter. For a client checking attendance of your guard at their shop, bar or warehouse, arrival time is the most common “mystery shop” check they will make. They will notice when they arrive late and will also be disappointed if they arrive towards the end of a shift to discover that the guard has left early. One late or sleepy night guard can lose a whole contract. One missing or inattentive safety steward can result in personal injuries. Who has not run an event where a few late individuals delay the start for thousands?
We have the evidence in front of us here in the support department of AXLR8. We can see people starting to turn up on time as soon as geofencing and CICO are implemented for our new clients. Often, those clients have come to us because they lost a client due to staff indiscipline.
Terms and Conditions
Work policies and procedures are agreed as they evolve. We all change working terms as a result of events or legal changes. When you publish new policies and other document changes, the Staff app makes sure guards are informed and must read and click to sign off their agreement before re-entering the Staff App for their shifts.
So people who have not read the new terms will be locked out of the App. These new paragraphs in your polocies could be about how welfare checks are about to change or the new uniform regulations. Obviously, you are managing people, not robots. There will be a way that objections may be dealt with. Hopefully, the staff communications will have prepared people for changes beforehand.
Strikes and discipline
Many of the best guards need a guiding hand. Getting a strike draws a line and improves behaviour. Sometimes people may come from school or another security company with lower standards to yours. Some of our clients automate and email to staff when they get a strike which informs them what it was for and what it means. The communication for a first second and third strike vary. This is all automated using Trigaware ™.
Welfare Checks
Check-ups keep people on their toes as well as checking lone worker welfare. We have been working on this for many years and it allows detection of the guard who falls asleep an can wreck a hard earned client relationship. Before we had the functionality for periodic checks with photographic evidence throughout the night, the first our clients heard about it was from an angry client. Experience shows it is often not laziness. Rather, it is due to working after completing a day shift elsewhere. Immediate detection means you can discuss the problem with the individual and decide upon the appropriate action.
Various features such as AXLR8 Checkpoints for physical night time tours. the AXLR8 Control Room portal or the alerts after missed Check ups have all made the issues rare. This is because the staff are accepting higher minimum levels of performance as the norm.
Fines and Incentives
Fines can be employed for lateness, poor appearance and indiscipline. They are controversial and can be negative or positive, It depends on how you wish to manage staff incentives. A little docked pay will probably not cover the cost of the damage done to a customer relationship by a guard no-show. A low or even zero cost pat on the back for someone who has reliably turned up for the last 50 shifts is something you can choose to publish. (Note, you can use the AXLR8 mailing manager for staff awards.)
Reports
AXLR8 systems have a Reporting function with standard reports for everything from applicant funnels to staff lateness, test results and booking team performance. Because everything is on the system, less time is taken in manual work wit audits and the financial automation takes care of payroll and client invoices.
Also, managers who learn the skills of ad hoc querying the data in the system using Report Builder get the numbers they need in order to make better decisions.
This means that management have more time to manage people and talk and listen to their staff and clients.
Communications
Your business can flag up good model examples and “employee of the month” type announcements. You can publicise prizes and incentives as well as other motivational messaging.
There are many comms channels you an use for one to one messaging which can improve staff.
- email newsletters
- push messaging (with the benefits of WhatsApp but without the risks)
- text (SMS) messaging
Examples of best practice
Praising great members of staff in the staff newsletters is an obvious good practice. For example, publicising employee(s) of the month. Perhaps you have an incentive or prize. Likewise, (see Surveys below) you thank named staff for new ideas for improvement and demonstrate how the management team listened and acted upon the ideas. All this creates a virutous circle and AXLR8 coomunications tools especially AXLR8 Staff Newsletters and AXLR8Chat make it easy to do.
Surveys
You can use the Questionnaire Builder for many purposes as well as quizzes and testing but Staff Feedback and “Ideas for improvement” are regularly undertaken by our clients. You can also use it for other surveys. One client worked with us to create a simple questionnaire asking staff what equipment and uniforms they had so they could assess stocks before re-ordering for the next season’s events. The results were hilarious. T-shirts, hi-viz, walkie talkies and even bollards in people’s stair cupboards and garages were half expected. Six Heras fences in the back garden with two line markers were quite a surprise. This does remind us that asset management is a drudge but really important! Please contact AXLR8 sales if you would like to implement AXLR8 Asset Management even if you do not use our staffing system.
SIA and Visa Expiry
SIA and other expiries raise alerts and restrict deployment. This may not be a fault of the guard but it certainly affects a company’s reputation when an unqualified person is working on a client site!
Vetting (BS7858) and qualifications
The BS7858 vetting system within AXLR8 is a popular module as it reduces vetting time and provides auditable information with all your staff vetting information in one place. You can work the staff during their allowable vetting period and the reference collection correspondence is auto generated from data imput by staff members in their e-application form.
AXLR8 systems allow you to add qualifications to your required entry for your staff bank and also for specific events. Then you can select only staff who are qualified for each shift. As soon as a badge expires, that staff member may not be booked on future shifts. Thus, you may book a DM at a bar on Friday 21st but not Saturday 22nd because the badge is due to expire that day. It is that simple!
Alerts will warn you about it too. The situation will be another prompt to see if the new certification is on the way or simply at some point in the checking process.
Identify those whom you do not want to re-employ
Most of us want to turn up on time and do a good job. Some do not. If development and disciplinary warnings do not work, then they should work for your competitors who do not care if they do a bad job! AXLR8 allows you to keep all the correspondence, and audit trail of date stamped Strikes and Notes in case of any tribunal claims about the dismissal process.
You can label such leavers as “Do not re-employ”. The application form will identify any reapplications and provide a message of your choice to such applicants. This comes as part of the general applicant deduplication mechanism in the AXLR8 ATS.
GDPR implications
This staff history data has GDPR implications and we can help with options to suit your policies for retaining details of people you do not want to re-employ. Clearly you need to have obtained their agreement to the retention of some information about them. This must be done at the point where they apply. Also make sure they understand such information may be kept after the termination of their employment for a reasonable, defined period. That period and the specific PII should be defined and their rights to erasure, rectification, etc. set out. For example, you should keep any pay data that HMRC may demand for six years. Media rights over images of staff should be agreed in perpetuity otherwise you’ll be re designing marketing materials every time someone leaves. Obtain their agreement to hold certain other types of notes and files if you have seasonal work and they come back every year. Make sure that any behaviour that has risked safety or your company’s reputation in any way may be held on the system in perpetuity also. All of us have a right to Erasure and to Rectification. So make sure you get legal advice on what constitutes a reasonable period of retention for this information.
You need your new HR people to be aware and not to hire known serial poor performers that you cannot afford to re-employ. The challenge here is that an internal HR or booking team may change and the recognition of staff who have been damaging must be retained in a system. We have a pre-application privacy agreement for the security industry if you would like to use it as a model for yours. There is also a GDPR e-book and podcast for the security guarding industry from AXLR8. Call us for either of these if you cannot find them on our site. AXLR8 are not lawyers. The purpose in bringing up this subject is that your discuss it in your management team and ask legal advice. You never want someone calling you to say “Who has re-hired Billy Bloggs? He was deliberately behaved badly at three concerts last year. We lost the security and stewarding contract to a competitor who turned out to be his brother. And he stole 300 staff telephone numbers from the Watsapp group!!”
Please also note that there is no “block” on that person providing feedback on the work conditions. Many young staff behave badly and return as reformed characters later for a successful career. The point is that you need to know that they behaved badly prior to leaving. For example their records should show that they failed to turn up for a safety critical post on three occasions putting client assets, colleagues or the public at risk and were fired two years ago. Only then can you make a fully informed choice of whether to re-hire them confident they are reformed or can be developed.
Your guards will step up to your definition of quality!
If you would like to know how any of these tools can help you measure and manage your staff selection, development and enjoyment of your high standards, please contact us on 01344 776500.