SECURITY, COMPLIANCE, AND EFFICIENCY—In today's fast-paced world, security and efficiency are two key factors that businesses strive to balance. But how do you make sure your security and compliance processes don’t get in the way of your organizational efficiency?
In this article we’ll take a look at how to increase efficiency across your entire organization by enhancing your security and compliance processes.
Efficiency + compliance
The misconception that creating processes and formalizing work will hinder the productivity of employees who have to adhere to these processes and formalities is one of the toughest lived myths in security and compliance over the past many years.
But this isn’t always true. In fact, with the right approach to compliance you could potentially make your organization more efficient.
What affects efficiency
There are two key factors that affect efficiency, the first is standardization and the second is operationalization.
Standardization is how you make your process repeatable. Whether we’re talking about a sales process, a security process or a visitor registration process, standardizing that process is going to make it faster, smoother and require less resources from your organization.
Operationalization is how you put your processes into effect. It includes finding out which steps in your process could be automated, where the weak points in the process are and how you gather data from each step in the process to further improve your operationalization.
Why is efficiency important
If we look at why efficiency matters the first thing that comes to mind is the return on investments you make in all of your processes. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about new systems, new hires or new operational processes, all of it costs money either directly or through the time spent by employees. And the more efficient your organization is, the more you can save (and the larger the return on investment).
Everyone who is invited to a meeting at your facility, steps into your lobby, and has to go through your registration process, is also affected by the efficiency of your operation, and they’re forming a positive or negative impression of your organization based on the efficiency of that process. Because of this efficiency also affects softer values like your organizational brand.
What affects compliance
From a security or visitor management perspective there are three things that can impact your organization’s ability to maintain compliance: A lack of security perimeters, time consuming manual processes and not having an agile access management strategy.
Why compliance is important
There are a number of security practices that will impact your business in one way or another. And whether they are self imposed security practices adopted to protect your business or they are regulations you need to comply with, they can have a negative impact on your organization – if you let them.
For instance, not living up to specific security requirements could lead to a loss of contracts with customers who require those security requirements to be met. In the same vein not living up to regulations imposed by outside authorities can lead to legal action against your company.
Two places you can increase efficiency in your security processes
Depending on your organization, organization, and the current situation in how you handle security there are potentially a number of places you could improve the efficiency of your physical security processes.
Here we’ve decided to highlight the three that most organizations can benefit from and seem to struggle with.
1. Invitations and registration
Individually there’s often room for improvement when looking at processes for inviting external guests to come to your workplace and registering visitors upon arrival, but this potential grows exponentially when looking at the relationship between invitations and registrations.
For the invitation process, there’s a good chance you have an internal process for approving external invitations either with security or compliance before an invitation is sent to the invitee, and after the invitation is accepted you likely have a pre-registration process to ensure both the reception and your security personnel is aware of who is showing up.
And on the day of arrival, visitors need to register with the reception most likely needing to answer a series of questions on who they are, which organization they come from, who their host is etc.
All of this takes time, and that time costs money. Either for your organization, your clients or your partners. And automating the flow of information from invitations and RSVPs to pre-registrations and visitor check-ins is an easy way to save both time and money—potentially a lot of money.
2. Tailored experiences
Clients, partners, contractors, service providers, employees on leave—every visitor is different and every visitor has a different purpose for coming to your premises. So why are you asking for identical information from each type of visitor? And why are you giving each visitor type the same experience?
Of course, in most cases the answer to that question is because it’s not efficient. If your chosen visitor management platform doesn’t support different registration flows for different visitor types the process of managing visitors by category or purpose becomes less efficient, not more efficient.
But on the other hand dividing visitors into specific categories, giving them the experience they need, and collecting different information based on the purpose of their visit can actually help other branches of the organization become more efficient. For instance, auditing for certain regulations can become a lot easier for the compliance department when the appropriate documentation is attached to each visit instead of being kept separately from visitor registration.