In the September 2021 print edition of Professional Security Magazine, we aim to look at what the workplace will look like, as covid pandemic restrictions are lifted in the UK, and what that will mean for private security.
Towards the end of a well-argued and learned book, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (2014), Gregory A Daddis quotes from the 1995 memoir of Robert McNamara, who as US Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was one of the central political figures in the Vietnam War. McNamara wrote of ‘the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements’.
What does that have to do with the likely workplace and wider urban landscape for the foreseeable future in the wake of coronavirus? Only that what employers want, what suits their investment in real estate, and the enormous urban infrastructure that until mid-March 2020 we took for granted – commuter railways and buses, coffee shops, advertising billboards on the main roads and on the Tube – are not the only factor in the equation. What employees want also counts; and what they say they want and what they truly want may be different things. Some, including those interviewed by Professional Security, have found that they are at least as productive when working from home, if not more so; and they quite like not having to pay to commute into a big city.
Since the lifting of pandemic restrictions Professional Security has been asking security and non-security people alike, what does the future of work look like? The answer has often used the same, or only, two words: hybrid working.
That begs further questions, because your hybrid way of working may have to fit in with your customers’, and your supply chains’. A lot will depend on the answers to two questions. First, security people as in any other occupation will have to navigate the new ‘nine to five’, if there is such a thing any more. Second, what will be the new demand for security products and services; and will some markets even exist?
As featured in the July 2021 edition of Professional Security, many have become used to doing things online by Zoom or Microsoft Teams, even important things done under the pressure of a tight deadline, such as reading, digesting and then commenting on the first report by the Manchester Arena Inquiry (itself an example of hybrid work, taking evidence remotely besides in court), as Security Industry Authority (SIA) staffers did within three hours on Thursday afternoon, June 17. If workers can do things remotely, and have for 15 months and counting, what is the point where remote working becomes the norm, and not working physically together in an office, as was the norm until March 2020?
Private security like other occupations has found itself split; between those functions that can operate from home, or rather without a particular desk or base; and those on the front-line, who as ‘key workers’ absolutely have to be in a physical place, whether managing a queue or controlling access at a door or gate, or guarding somewhere empty. Technology will have a part; for example, smart cameras can handle return to work measures — monitoring adherence to social distancing, face mask requirements or corporate occupancy management policies. HR will come into play – what of health and safety in the home workplace, data protection, and disposal of IT assets when workers change jobs? How to build a team spirit, bring on new hires, counter fraud, without a central physical workplace?
Photo by Mark Rowe; Bristol city centre, summer evening.
