Staff protection technology: How to keep your restaurant or retail workers safe
In public-facing stores, or in situations where you have people working alone, staff safety is a critical concern – and nowhere more so than in the restaurant and retail sectors, where abuse towards workers is at an all-time high. Indeed, a British Retail Consortium survey uncovered a 50% increase in violence and abuse towards retail workers in 2022/23, with a staggering 1,300 incidents reported each day.
Whether you’re concerned about a robbery unfolding in a busy shop or a medical episode occurring while someone’s working alone in a fast food outlet at night, staff protection technology is here to help – and it’s more advanced than ever.
Panic alarm technology – now with live de-escalation
Let’s start with the obvious one. If a member of staff finds themselves under duress in a robbery situation, panic alarm technology can help. The touch of a panic button relays an emergency alert back to the control room, triggering highly trained operatives to spring into action in line with the emergency protocols you’ve put in place – which typically means calling the emergency services.
Here at iFacility, we go further than this, establishing two-way verbal and visual communications with the store so that we can immediately start trying to de-escalate the situation remotely, there and then. We can even talk to different parts of the store, enabling us to calm the situation with the intruder at the front of the store while warning those working behind the scenes to stay safe.
At the same time, our intelligent security system starts recording high-resolution footage of the incident, which will be useful for the subsequent police investigation.
Remote monitoring for night shifts
When you have a business that operates around the clock, like a 24-hour QSR outlet, the safety of your workforce goes up in importance, especially when you have employees working night shifts on their own. Night-time working presents a number of challenges, with fewer people around and lower visibility, leaving staff more vulnerable to incidents.
CCTV technology, and more specifically the services it enables, has a vital role to play in protecting lone workers, becoming the means by which remote security personnel can keep an eye on them. There are several ways of doing this:
● By phone: at the most basic, least technologically advanced level, remote security services can arrange regular calls from the control room to your staff member to check in with them and make sure all is well.
● By device: the employee gets a wearable device through which they’re sent a signal at regular intervals. They click a button to respond to this signal to show they’re ok.
● On camera: regular remote check-ins via live security camera footage means a remote security team can check the whereabouts of your employee and be on the lookout for behaviour that could be cause for concern.
If there’s no answer on the phone, no response from the wearable device or camera footage reveals a problem, remote monitoring services like ours can follow an emergency protocol agreed with you to escalate the situation and get someone on site without delay.
Enhancing security with AI
As you might expect, the capabilities of CCTV and other security technology have grown exponentially with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), which can now enhance staff security in a number of ways.
● For a start, motion detection has got a whole lot better, with our in-house technology now understanding whether or not motion is caused by a human, and therefore being a lot more effective at detecting intruders.
● Thanks to facial recognition, security cameras can also tell the difference between people who have authorised access and those who haven’t, and they can spot known offenders.
● AI can also spot abnormal behaviour, such as someone not moving for a prolonged period – especially useful when monitoring lone workers.
With its powerful new AI-powered abilities, CCTV now goes far beyond traditional security, offering businesses like yours new ways to show you’re serious about staff safety and wellbeing.
Time to upgrade your security? Give us a call on 01749 600 600 or email hello@ifacility.co.uk to find out more about how our staff protection systems can keep your workers safe.