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SECURITY OFFICER SCHEDULES
It should be clearly understood between the client and the contract service that each officer work only reasonable shifts.
Except in occasional unusual situations or periods of emergency, officers should not normally work double shifts or regular shifts exceeding twelve hours. This applies regardless of where the shifts are worked--that is officers working eight hours at another account should not then proceed on to a second eight hour shift at your account. Obviously, being a people business, occasional exceptions might occur, but they should not become routine.
As a general rule, officers should work eight hour shifts and should not exceed forty-eight hours per week. This should be made clear in the client's bid specifications.
A rotation of duties often works to keep the officers at peak alertness. It should also be specifically mentioned here that officers assigned to monitor CCTV systems lose most of their effectiveness after twenty minutes. Studies have shown, for instance that after an officer has been viewing a bank of monitors for over a half hour, an intruder could likely appear on screen momentarily without being noticed or perceived by the officer. Unless a CCTV system has intrusion detection capabilities rotation is necessary or the system loses a good deal of its value.
In the case of a large complex, the shift supervisors should be assigned to shifts of eight and a half hours. The half-hour overlap is to give them time to update the oncoming shift supervisor of the status of the facility, any unusual activity in progress, and any other information of interest. This overlap should be paid time to the shift supervisors, if they are hourly, not gratis time.
Proper scheduling is the responsibility of the service provider and the client should not be expected to pay overtime for deficiencies in the contractor's scheduling.
Several years ago during an L.P.C., Ltd. security survey at an exceptionally large facility, it was found that officers being paid substandard wages typically worked forty hours a week, but five of the significantly higher paid sergeants and lieutenants, were regularly scheduled to eighty hour shifts each week. When a client representative was questioned about this anomaly, he said all the other officers provided by the contract service were losers and he only trusted the ones who worked the long hours at his request and for which he paid a time and a half rate to the security service for overtime hours.
Our recommendation here was to put the contract out for bid using specifications that called for higher wages. Elimination of the charged overtime resulted in obtaining a service paying all officers a dollar an hour more than the previous service--and the overall cost to the client company was significantly less. This was, of course, a very unusual situation and this company representative was unable to explain why he dealt with a business (owned by a friend) which provided "losers," leading us to believe there might have been a problem with internal ethics.
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