Just about every major city bar or club hospitality association has published some form of “Best Practices”. These lists, sometimes very long and exhaustive, have tried to cover the most important points to help their members have a better chance for success. This lists tend to be very involved and, sometimes, way over a ground level employee.
After reading dozens of documents, we’ve put together an easier and much simpler way to understand best practices. This list will coincide with the most common reasons someone files a civil lawsuit against a bar or club.
Here we go with 5 simple recommended Best Practices:
· Inadequate Hiring. Have a real and consistent method of hiring all employees. Waiting till you need someone is dangerous. This is especially true with any security guard. Use applications and verify the information on them. Hold two separate interviews and consider using a “team” style interview process. Finally, attempt to build a list of possible new hires before you need someone.
· Inadequate Policies & Procedures. Have a company policy manual that EVERY employee is given and have a separate, very specific, Security Policy & Procedure Manual (SPP). The SPP should cover issues that pop up most on a daily basis for door hosts, ID checkers, floor hosts or bouncers. Make this SPP as complete and comprehensive as you can. Finally, be sure you issue it to every guard and have them sign for it.
· Inadequate Management. Managers must be involved in any incident that could lead to ANY litigation. This means the team must be trained and ordered to notify a manager for any medium or major event. On duty managers are considered the “most knowledgeable” during any civil litigation. They must be there to witness, assist and oversee incidents that could lead to litigation. Making change, getting ice, helping in the kitchen isn’t acceptable.
· Inadequate Number of Guards. Don’t ever skimp or under staff security guard positions. Labor costs are measurable and any operator should start planning for having more guards than they think they need. The initial response to having a larger number of guards is; “they aren’t doing anything but standing around, what a waste of money”. Operators should notice that when they have plenty of guards, they have fewer across the board, problems. Fewer problems translate into increased revenue.
· Inadequate Training. Get your employees the most complete and thorough training available and don’t stop with a single training session every 2-4 years. Obviously servers should have server training and build on those standard sessions with shorter “reminder” training sessions on a monthly basis. For anyone whose primary duty is security, DO NOT settle for the lowest standard available, this is too often, the individual state licensing training. Your bar or club guards must have totally job specific training instead of the state mandated generic training. Job specific training should cover Conflict Resolution, Force Issues, Private Persons Detention, Incident Documentation and more! Again, don’t settle for the lowest standard available.
These five best practices are easy to understand and straight to the point. There is no doubt that if a bar or club operator followed this list, they would absolutely see lower incident of violence, lower incidents of over-service, reduced police visits, reduced civil lawsuits and reduced expensive insurance premiums.
Finally, to that last point on Inadequate Training, we are offering the first ever National HOST Security Certification at the Nightclub & Bar Show, March 30 – April 1. This training session is the first National Certification and most job specific training in the country. It is the first approved training in the state of California for in-house security guards in any bar or club. It is, by far, way above any hospitality industry standard for the training of bar or club security guards. Sorry, but you have no excuse to have under trained security guards.
Register today for your National Security Training Certification. www.ncbshow.com/security-training