5 Inexpensive Ways To Boost Your Business' Security By Thinking Beyond The Front Door

Boosting security at your business doesn't always mean simply locking more doors or moving to a more secure location. There are many ways to increase safety for your employees and your investment by thinking outside the box.

Here are five examples any business can implement.

Train Employees

Your employees are a wonderful asset when it comes to protecting the business. Make better use of them by training them with security in mind. Encouraging employees to remain alert to unusual behavior, strangers in their areas, and which doors should be secured or unsecured can all help add safety without adding cost.

Make sure employees in each area understand where all the security measures are and how to use them properly. Ask for input on where additional measures might be taken - including asking how you can make employees feel more secure as they work.

Control Entry

The fewer entry and exit points your business has, the more you can control who is on the plant site and why. If employees, customers, and vendors have been coming and going through exterior doors aside from the main entry point, lock those doors and route traffic through designated doors instead.

At designated entry doors, be sure that there are employees who can monitor and assist visitors. Requiring visitors to identify with whom they are meeting and calling employees to verify this is an easy way to ensure everyone is authorized. If you add cameras to less-used entry doors, they can be monitored by this front desk as well.

Avoid Isolation

Isolated locations within your business are potentially easier targets for thieves and suspicious persons. Are there offices or shops on your property where only one or two employees work far away from the rest of the employees? Do individual employees often work before or after hours by themselves? Do you have a very small overnight shift?

Any of these situations make your people and those open buildings at risk. Reduce risk by grouping more employees together, so fewer are so isolated. Also, discourage employees from staying late alone by shifting workloads around. And consider either expanding your night shift to make the building more full or perhaps shifting those operations to daylight hours.

Lock Specific Items

Think beyond the exterior door locks. Within your company's offices, warehouses, or plant site, there are likely areas that could use more security than other areas. Assess your business with a walk-through to determine what is more sensitive, more valuable, or more dangerous.

Individual areas that often benefit from extra security include management or accounting offices (which often have personal information), inventory storage, expensive tools, precious metals, and hazardous chemicals used. When assessing how to secure these things, consider everything from locking up the department as a whole to controlling specific rooms only or adding a cabinet or cage locks for storage of small items.

Use Automatic Locking

Things that automatically close and lock behind people and vehicles add protection without any extra work. Simply replacing an aging, hand-operated front gate with an automated gate system means no one will forget to close up behind them.

The same goes for interior doors into sensitive offices. Electric strike door locks, for example, close automatically and cannot be bypassed during a power loss. But employees can still exit using knobs on the inside.

For more ideas on how you can inexpensively improve the safety of everyone who comes into your business, talk to the security pros at  SCSC Southern California Security Center  today. With 45 years' of experience aiding California businesses to keep ahead of threats, they can help you find peace of mind.