Below are some actions you can take to assess and improve your facility security. Successfully implementing these security measures requires you to effectively engage various groups within and outside of your organization, including supervisors, managers, employees, outside contractors, or municipal services.

• Advise management and employees to report any suspicious persons or activity in or around the facility.

• Establish and follow visitor control procedures such as mandatory sign-ins, name badges, escorts, orientation, etc.

• Survey locks, fences, exterior lights, and other physical security devices to ensure that they are in place where needed and in proper operating condition. Establish a monthly inspection of your security perimeter and key protective features of your facility.

• Pay special attention to areas containing stocks of explosive, flammable, or toxic chemicals. These areas should be properly secured and inventoried, with reduced hands-on contact of these materials if possible.

• Evaluate critical locations in your facility for proper security such as the electric, telephone, and gas units, building entrances, transformers, outside storage units, and computer rooms.
   

• If your facility has a security/fire alarm system, be sure it is operating properly and that key personnel know how to arm/disarm it.

• Make sure that fire suppression systems are inspected and maintained properly. And be sure that a sufficient number of trusted personnel know how to activate, operate, and shut them down.

• Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) can serve as an excellent crime deterrent. When the CCTV system is equipped with a recorder it can help solve crimes.

• Review your procedures for issuing facility keys and access cards. At a minimum, keep lists of who has been issued keys/cards and have a procedure for handling a situation when a troubled employee is terminated without returning them.

• Discuss security with your local police department. Some police departments provide excellent information and support to businesses and industries.

• Have your local fire department conduct a pre-planned visit to your locations. While there, they can identify target hazards and plan fire suppression priorities.

Always review significant facility or process changes with your insurance advisor and loss control representative.

The view from 30,000 feet: One of the most important roles of any executive is to orchestrate and gather resources that can help them to optimize the performance of their company. There are many risks — organizational, strategic, traditional hazards, regulatory, environmental and technology, just to specify a few.

The C-Level executive must be in a position to draw upon talent in every area to better identify risk. The investors require it. The Board requires it. Employees require it. Orchestrate and gather your resources!

Many times losses (physical, human and financial) are the result of not identifying hazards that can lead to a loss. Sometimes it’s just common sense. And other times it’s a lot more involved.

Be proactive in your approach. Identify potential hazards and remove them or have them eliminated. It can save you, your business and most important of all, your employees from suffering serious harm.

Example: There, on every pack of cigarettes, is the Surgeon General’s hazard warning. It’s there for the consumer’s enlightenment.

But what about the hazard cigarettes pose for the company? If smoking is allowed in your building there is an increased likelihood that fire will occur.

And, relatively speaking: How great a hazard is that compared to the overloading of workplace outlets or if your non-licensed maintenance/repair staff installs additional electrical wiring in a shoddy manner thereby increasing the likelihood of a short which could cause a fire? This may seem to be getting down to fine detail, but sometimes this is the difference between the success and the failure of a risk management program.

Always keep in mind: Risk management is not meant to be negative. It is clearly a positive opportunity to increase margins and decrease expenses – resulting in an increased or optimized return on investment.

The real trick is to recognize and address hazards that can lead to a potential disaster or even an opportunity. While most C-Level executives are lay people in this regard, there are experts in varying disciplines as well as loss control experts who can assist in identifying these hazards.

Let’s take a more specific look at what exactly risk management is about. Searching the literature I find a number of definitions. Here are a few I think focus your thinking:

1. Risk Management is the practice of protecting an organization from financial harm by identifying, analyzing, and controlling risk at the lowest possible cost.

1. Risk management is the active identification, evaluation and management of all potential hazards and exposures to loss that a company may experience.
2. Risk management should be a continuous process of identifying loss exposures, measuring them against the firm’s ability to tolerate them, then handling them with the appropriate control, transfer or financing techniques.

The most fitting is the first definition because it is very blunt with regard to “protecting an organization….at the lowest possible cost.” Everything else is a discussion point. You should always try to keep this in mind when discussing the purchase of an insurance product or discussing other risk management techniques because, after all, that is what we are all after – the lowest cost.

The challenge is to think about ways in which to reduce costs, properly communicate the pros and cons of each choice and arrive at the proper solution that will best protect the organization.

However, the key to definition #2 is that it has the word “active” in it. It’s absolutely essential that you keep informed about things going on around us – locally, nationally and internationally – that bristle with the potential to affect your business/organization in an adverse way. Once you recognize a certain “exposure”, you must act on it one way or the other. And, obviously, one of the “act on it” steps may be classic insurance.

REDUCE THE RISK / BOOST YOUR BOTTOM LINE

Protecting your organization from financial harm is the #1 Goal. Doing that, at the least possible cost, is admirable (but not practical) – you must be actively involved in recognizing potential exposures and hazards on a continuing basis throughout the year. Jump in with both feet and ask, “How can we improve our risk management program today and tomorrow and beyond?” That’s a continuous process.

Definition #3 identifies risk management as a “continuous process.“ It’s not appropriate to establish or simply renew your insurance program and then put it up on the shelf until next year. Risk management is a continuous process that begins even before a policy is written and does not really end at all.

It is a work in process/progress where you continually look to improve coverage, terms, conditions, claims reporting/handling, loss control/mitigation, exposure analysis/identification and the like, year after year.

The “notice” provisions in all insurance policies should be modified to mean notice to a specific individual.

 Here is another one of those “missed” clauses. How many times have you heard someone say “I never received the notice”?

Just recently a prospect was explaining to us that they were sent a letter from a law firm placing them on notice of a potential claim. “Someone” at the front desk apparently signed for the letter but it never reached the person in charge of handling the insurance.

A second request was sent but months later, which was finally forwarded to the insurance carrier. Unfortunately, the second letter placing the insurance carrier on notice was submitted after the expiration of the prospect’s claims made policy.

The insurance company held their position that they would not defend on the basis of late notice because the first letter the plaintiff’s attorney sent was in fact signed for by the insured (someone in their office i.e receptionist) and they should have placed the carrier on notice at that time.

Obviously this was a big problem. One way to avert that from happening is to have the insurance policy state that proper notice/knowledge of claim must go to a specific person before the clock starts ticking.

Bottom Line:

The insurance company knows what every single word of the contract means and how various clauses will work at the time of a loss or claim – make certain that you know how your policies will work in the event of a claim or loss.