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Professional staffing of a CCTV control room

A great deal of work that I do with companies using CCTV is protecting high value assets. Those concerned with human life obviously fall into this category, such as police and town centres, but high value is also reflected in sectors such as precious minerals, casinos, banks, aviation, as well as jewellery.

In these as well as some other instances, reputations may also be the precious element, such as shopping centres or financial institutions. In nearly all of these cases, the organisations have spent significant amounts on technical installations of CCTV. Increasingly, these types of organisations, concerned about the value inherent of their industry, are also spending more on the operators, supervisors and managers responsible for realising the value of the technical investment.

Having a professionally staffed CCTV function has benefits for clients, installers and service providers who identify and staff these functions in terms of outcomes and reputations. Yet it continues to amaze me how little emphasis major CCTV users put on the people who operate the system, particularly when these are contracted personnel. It seems to be an out of sight, out of mind approach until something serious happens.

This is partly because most contract security staff are provided by traditional guarding companies who have endured in the industry by minimising costs and working extensively with a low paid workforce. These are not the best ingredients for a professional operator function, although I often find highly capable and motivated personnel operating at these levels. I remember a manager saying at one stage that he took whomever he was given as an operator by the contracting company and had no say in it. Yet he was probably very particular about the kind of technical equipment being installed. His expensive technical equipment was being crippled by the people who were supposed to run it – think of it as working to the lowest common denominator.

Lowest cost factor

It is not to say that guarding companies are not capable of providing such personnel, but they are typically pushed by clients to do so rather than making it a voluntary proactive focus. At the same time, clients who want a professionally staffed CCTV function need to recognise that they have to pay or contribute to it and tendering on the lowest price in the guarding industry is not going to deliver the solution they need.

Either companies need to specify these requirements as part of the tender, or they need to contribute to the costs to make their operation perform at a higher level.

I have outlined what I think could be expected from a professional CCTV staffing function for a client recently and I think could be applied to any operation. These are, largely, success factors for CCTV personnel. The most successful clients using CCTV that I work with apply these principles.

1. Do not just accept standard guard personnel in the control room unless they have demonstrated their suitability for a control room environment. Control room personnel need to be selected on the basis of their abilities to observe, analyse, decide and communicate. Experience, or security officer grading, are also not necessarily suitable qualifications.

I know of operators who have been working in CCTV positions for 15 years who have never spotted an appreciable incident. We are seeing the increasing use of younger people who are keen on contributing and who are highly motivated and willing to learn. These personnel can quickly pick up the knowledge associated with security officer grading and are willing to question and critically analyse the things they see around them. Experience is an advantage, but if people can acquire knowledge through a dedicated programme, this can often compensate. I am often asked if there is a pool of operators a client can draw from – quite simply there is a shortage of excellent operators and the best way of getting them is to grow your own.

2. Integrity is important. Often contractors pass on other people’s problems to you. Anybody in a professional control room environment should have their integrity checked, probably through a combination of criminal record checking, polygraph, credit checking, qualifications verification, and reference checking. Look for examples during an interview when there have been attempts to compromise the operator candidate and how they handled it.

3. I find that the most important factor in CCTV operator success is that they want to catch somebody. Far too many applicants merely want an increase in salary or a comfortable chair. Where personnel have demonstrated that they can catch people in the past, they are likely to carry that through to the future. Such people see work as a challenge – they go into work with the objective of detecting criminal actions. Look for a record of previous personal detection of incidents.

4. Observation and visual analysis skills are an essential requirement for minimum performance. We have conducted research using incident video material and found that a surprisingly large number of people only detect 5% to 15% of actual incidents in the footage. In a paper I presented recently at an Australian security conference, use of tests which look at visual analysis skills such as the SAMAE and ScanX selection instruments showed a huge relationship with successful detection. Quite simply, there are a large number of personnel in control rooms who are not very good at seeing the things they are supposed to be looking for, and by selecting or screening the right kind of people, you can make your operation far more effective. If personnel do not have any observation and visual analysis skills, they are never likely to be effective operators.

5. An enquiring mind, the willingness to question, and being able to look at things from different angles are important in picking up incidents that people have not even been aware of previously.

6. Having the right temperament to work in a control room is also necessary, even for short-term stability and effectiveness. I have met some people who would have been banging their heads against the wall or causing chaos if they had to work in a control room for an extended time. Some of the key characteristics that come through are emotional stability and consistency, the ability to keep calm under pressure, conscientiousness, tough minded and willing to take decisions that can impact on others, sceptical and not taking things at face value or for granted, insightful on people and social behaviour, willing to look at new or different approaches, and self sufficient and self-disciplined.

We also find that introverted people tend to make better CCTV operators than extroverts in that they do not have the same need for constant social exchanges with others, although it is sometimes useful to have a mixture of people in the control room.

7. Verbal as well as written communications skills are also important elements. In both of these areas, the ability to focus on the point and get the message across in as short a form as possible are relevant.

The factors above are all contributors to an a CCTV operator with plenty of professional potential, but the right people still have to be trained and managed the right way in order to deliver on performance. However, if you get the initial selection right and identify personnel with the right characteristics, the control room capacity for delivering excellent operational and detection performance is greatly increased.

Dr Craig Donald is a human factors specialist in security and CCTV. He is a director of Leaderware which provides instruments for the selection of CCTV operators, X-ray screeners and other security personnel in major operations around the world. He also runs CCTV Surveillance Skills and Body Language, and Advanced Surveillance Body Language courses for CCTV operators, supervisors and managers internationally, and consults on CCTV management. He can be contacted on +27 (0)11 787 7811 or craig.donald@leaderware.com

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