Author: Eric Smith
ISBN No: 9780-124165-571
Review date: 03/05/2024
No of pages: 224
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Publisher URL:
http://store.elsevier.com/Workplace-Security-Essentials/Eric-Smith/isbn-9780124165571/
Year of publication: 19/05/2014
Brief:
Workplace Security Essentials: A Guide for Helping Organisations Create Safe Work Environments, by Eric Smith. Published 2014 by Butterworth-Heinemann. Paperback
price
£23.24
This guide to workplace security opens with a novel idea: business karate. Think, the author Eric Smith suggests, of securing a site as like a form of self-defence, on a large scale than yourself. Smith writes as someone who has enjoyed studying martial arts, and does not make the mistake of applying his comparison too strictly. But if it gets readers thinking and doing, that’s good, whether you think in terms of ‘stance’ (to be in the right position to perform a block, kick or a punch) or more broadly of asset protection. And, as in karate, you have to practice the moves; talk and awareness are not enough. And as with karate belts, not everyone can or even wants to be a black belt (that Smith defines in business security terms as security issues integrated into operational business decisions and risks from crime and security events are evaluated). A white belt, the first, is only a beginning, perhaps no more than marketing, but it’s something. Blocking an attack, without under-blocking or over-blocking, is indeed critical as Smith says. If you over-block and leave yourself short elsewhere, you could leave yourself exposed to a second punch, whether a second bomb or a disgruntled worker. You may keep your guard up with strangers, but don’t we relax our guard with colleagues, and customers we have know for a long time? That’s why the karate approach only takes us so far; we also have to think of such intangibles as trust and confidence. In fairness to Smith, he does; he is well aware of the insider threat: “Employees may pose a greater risk than the crooks on the outside.” While not having any employees would avoid the risk, but is not realistic, he makes the wise point that preventing staff theft ‘starts at the hiring phase’. Here may be the first part of the book that is too American for UK taste or law; he describes drug screening as ‘a typical process’.
Without going through the entire book, Smith covers plenty of ground, from vandalism and car parking security to violence at work, whether because of domestic violence or dangerous customers or an active shooter, no longer something that only happens in America, after the Nairobi mall shootings last year. As so often, Smith advises that with workplace violence ‘an ounce of prevention is truly worth far more than a pound of cure’. Though all along the author makes the case for good security being good business – or, a lack of good security being bad for business – the final chapter makes the explicit case for workplace safety, whether staff are travelling or leaving work to walk to their car. A likeable book that will spark a lot of ideas in someone entering the industry, or someone who’s been in a while and feeling maybe jaded. A book for the Karate Kid in all of us.
Workplace Security Essentials: A Guide for Helping Organisations Create Safe Work Environments, by Eric Smith. Published 2014 by Butterworth-Heinemann. Paperback, 224 pages, £23.24. ISBN: 9780-124165-571. Visit www.elsevier.com.
About the author: A former police officer, he works in healthcare security based in Denver; and trains in dealing with an active shooter; and has the ASIS CPP qualification.
