6 TIPS TO RETAIN GOOD SECURITY OFFICERS
Turnover is always a challenge in the contract security industry, but not all employee turnover has the same impact.
While losing mediocre employees creates more work for you, losing your best security officers can impact the health of your business.
If you’re struggling to retain your best security officers, follow these six tips.
Ensure Job Fit From Day One
No one wants to work at a job that prevents them from spending time with their families or forces them to work in an environment that clashes with their preferred working styles.
To keep your security officers long-term, make sure you’re putting them in an ideal position on their first day on the job. Follow these tips to ensure you’re hiring the right person for the job:
- Tip #1: Determine what shift they want to work. The hours that people work have an impact on their personal time. To retain your security officers, put them on shifts that complement—rather than impede—the things they want to do in their time off of work.
- Tip #2: Find out how they like to work. Some people thrive when they’re surrounded by others. Others thrive when working alone. Determine the ideal working conditions for each new security guard, and place them in roles that match those preferences.
- Tip #3: Ascertain their long-term goals. Some employees may have goals to move into supervisory positions. Others get bored easily and want to learn something new every few months. Find out what new security officers are looking for in the future, then, for example, you can create paths to promotion or plans to move them into new roles.
Sometimes, you can ascertain the answers to these questions during an interview. However, when people are just hoping to get hired, they may give you the answers they think you want to hear rather than truly honest answers.
A better way to find out what each new security guard needs is to use Kwantek’s Working Style Assessment. Our pre-hire assessment asks prospective employees a series of questions that help you determine the best job fit for new security officers, providing you with honest answers about each employee’s preferred working conditions, ideal environments, and long-term goals.
Provide Great Security Officers with Incentives to Stay
Getting new employees in the right role is just step one of retaining them. Once they’re in their positions and doing great work, you need to make an effort to incentivize them to stay.
And while the most obvious incentive is increased pay, that may not always be a viable option for your business. Luckily, there are plenty of other ways to keep great security officers engaged:
- Tip #4: Offer unique benefits. Even if you can’t afford frequent salary increases, you can make your position better than others your security officers may be considering. Consider increasing the amount of paid time-off your best security officers get, moving them to locations closer to their homes, or offering free snacks and coffee at work.
- Tip #5: Create a great culture. Creating a great culture doesn’t require a monumental effort. Sometimes, it’s as simple as making your employees feel heard. Build a culture where everyone feels valued by making sure employees have regularly scheduled meetings with their supervisors where they’re free to ask questions and share concerns.
- Tip #6: Provide incentives to stay. Consider offering officers an annual bonus for each year they stay on the job, giving your most tenured officers their choice of shifts or locations, or creating a promotion path that satisfies the goals of ambitious officers.
Retaining your best security officers isn’t always a matter of offering the highest salary. By providing your security officers with a work environment that makes them feel comfortable and valued—and benefits that provide them with a better work-life balance—you can create positions that are much harder for great security officers to walk away from.
Avoid Turnover and Retain Your Best Security Officers
Sometimes, high turnover—even among your best employees—feels inevitable in the contract security industry. However, if you put people in the right roles from day one and offer unique incentives for great employees to stay with your company, you can stop the revolving door and start retaining your best security officers long-term.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Kwantek’s Working Style Assessment can help you identify the best candidates in the pre-hire process, click here to schedule a demo.