Guarding Service Delivery Should Avoid “Fatigue Battle”

     Due to the special characteristics of guarding service, field officers work on a 24 hour shift basis. To ensure adequate rest every day is not only a guarantee for service quality, but also an important humanitarian endeavor to keep the service team stable and professional. However, overtime shift arrangement and “fatigue battle” is a common phenomenon among field officers. Needless to say, guarding service delivery should avoid “fatigue battle”. Unlike other services, security officers must concentrate for each and every second on their post so as to identify potential risks and to countermeasure in a timely manner. Inadequate rest will not only cause a clumsy appearance, but also lead to retarded risk identification and clumsy response. Moreover, guarding is in itself a highly-repeated and boring experience. Inadequate rest will make the job an unpleasant choice for field officers. 
    Many reasons cause the “fatigue battle” phenomenon, among which there are three main reasons. First, some clients lack understanding of guarding service and believe that security officers have a lot of unattended time between the shifts. Hence they tend to keep the officers busy with miscellaneous tasks. In order to keep up good client relations, security officers try to respond to such tasks by using up the time for rest. Second, some supervisors do not have reasonable arrangement between the shifts, occupying the resting time with training sessions and hence unintentionally cause mental and physiological burden to the officers. Third, some guarding companies disregard the stipulations in the Labour Law and roster the officers’ shift beyond the legitimate working hours. 
    We should keep to the long-term interest of team development, striving to protect the lawful rights of security officers. Adequate and reasonable rest should be guaranteed for the officers. “Fatigue battle” should be avoided. Only by such means, can we ensure our officers work with a healthy attitude to the effect of protecting the client’s security.