Your security guards are your first responders

The security guards that are sitting at your condo's front desk are not there to give you and your guests a hard time, they are there to help make your life a little easier and in many buildings a whole lot safer.

The key to have good security is to insure that your guards are well trained with regular refresher sessions, paid a little better than the industry norm, have a good work ethic and are properly supervised.

The guards should have a decent change and lunch rooms. The lunch room should have a hot water kettle, a microwave a small frig.

It is also important that they know who they report to and that they will be supported if they are abused or harassed by unreasonable residents.

How sausages are made
If you saw how sausages were made, you would never eat one is an old truism. If you read George Orwell's book "Down and Out in London and Paris", you would never eat in a luxury restaurant or in a cheap working-class one. If you knew how poorly some security personal were trained and/or performed their duties, you may not sleep so well.

Check up on them

The condo should check, from time-to-time on the afternoon and midnight security staff. The manager will not do that and the patrols by the security company's mobile supervisor may be ineffective.

When the the security company's mobile supervisor finds a guard asleep or is off-site sitting at a local donut shop, don't expect the security company to report this to the condo manager.

So this is up to the directors to do the spot checks, if you can find any of them that will. However, be reasonable. If the guard is reading or watching a movie on the condo's computer, why worry about that? He or she is on the job and is awake, right? That's what is important.

Undesirable behaviour

Having years of experience servicing the condo sector, I suggest that these are the behaviours that you need to discourage:

1.	Sleeping on the job is by far the most common problem. Guards may be sleeping at the front desk, sleep in the back or in their car in the underground parking garage.
	Far lesser problems include:
2.	Leaving the site. Maybe they have gone to a donut shop to buy lunch, are upstairs visiting a resident or they went home for a couple of hours of proper sleep.
3.	Watching pornography on the desktop computer. With the new window-wall lobbies, more guards are getting caught doing this. It gets really gross when they masturbate while watching porn.
	Yes, this happens. When the mobile supervisor caught one guard at it, he just got a warning. At a different condo, the guard was transferred to a different condo because a resident caught him masturbating.
4.	Stealing; anything from office supplies to cellphones and bicycles.
5.	Smoking pot is common among the younger guards, and some not so young. You can smell it if they smoke joints but if they use a vapour, then that is a lot harder to detect.
6.	Alcoholics and heavy drug users. Yep a few are still with us.
7.	Having friends or relatives join them at the job site. One video gamer had three friends show up at work so they could all play an online video game together.
8.	Use the amenities. Some guards will use the condo's gym to work out while the odd one will have their girl friend/boy friend come on site so they can use the guest suite.
9.	Pencil whipping: Recording false information in equipment logs and shift reports rather than taking the actual measurements and writing accurate reports.
10.	Ignoring residents when they violate the by-laws and rules.

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