Canny Communication Supports Effective Multitenant Security
Multitenant buildings in suburban, exurban, and rural areas often have the luxury of space, especially when it comes to security considerations. Perimeters can be established further out from facilities, with parking lots, hedgerows, guard booths, fences, or other buffers generating obstacles against an attacker.
But the luxury of layered controls for perimeter security and other systems doesn’t exist in urban environments. Instead, layered security for urban multitenant buildings is heavily dependent upon the relationships between security and the building’s stakeholders, generating countless differences from one building to another.
“Not every building is the same. Every property management firm handles their buildings differently,” says Don Aviv, CPP, PCI, PSP, CEO of Interfor International.
There are some standard expectations of what security will look like for the layperson entering a skyscraper or other Class A building in the heart of a city—a guard at a check-in desk, a turnstile in the lobby, and offices in the floors above with individualized badge readers to name a few. But ensuring that security systems protect people and assets goes beyond technology; it relies on effective communication.
Understanding the Habitat
Until recently, multitenant buildings have largely consisted primarily of office spaces, accommodating various firms or organizations with separate spaces or floors throughout a single building. There may be a coffee shop or convenience store occupying part of the ground floor. Certain security concerns, such as building occupancy rhythms, emergency egress procedures, and building lobby layout, may fall into a similar pattern, but it would be a mistake to assume multitenant security is cookie-cutter operation.
“No tenant has the same need,” says Parnell Lea, security and life safety director for Brookfield Properties. “You can try to align them, but it’s pretty hard to do because they all have their own security needs.”
Increasing the complexity, the makeup of multitenant properties has shifted in some regions. With real estate prices at a premium and modern demands changing, multitenant facilities are increasingly sites for offices, residences, hotel rooms, retail stores, restaurants, and more. Each of these tenants, each from a different industry, may have unique demands upon security, according to René Rieder, CPP, PSP, security practice lead for Burns.
Getting a profile of a building or complex’s tenant population is a good first step and can help a team determine the likely security and operational demands. A slew of boutique retail stores on the ground floor will have a different risk profile than an oil company establishing a headquarters and sprawling out across multiple floors.
“I think what’s key for any professional, working in this market specifically, is to kind of take that step back first and really understand the business operation of the facility. How is it intended to operate? What are the desires? What are the pain points?” Rieder says.
Generating a profile of a particular tenant should involve learning the tenants’ appetites for security. While all organizations will be subject to a building’s perimeter security posture, especially at entry and exit points, the tenants may want varied, independent security systems for their own spaces, such as a badge reader to secure a single office or floor or a specific IT infrastructure room within a larger space. Ensuring that tenants know that those individual systems will need to be connected to the building’s overall systems (preferably before the installation) can help circumvent headaches. For example, if an employee is fired, connected systems allow the individual organization’s HR department to contact building security and any other relevant parties about revoking the exiting employee’s access to the office and overall facility, according to Aviv. This can prevent or deter the former employee from easily accessing former colleagues in the lobby or other assets in the tenant’s space.
Security may even need to expand even further, with major tenants’ risk profiles and security requirements possibly affecting the building’s perimeter security measures. Several of Lea’s tenants are oil companies, and he notes that those companies tend to maintain their own corporate security departments and their own standards.
“They’ll have their own security team. They’ll have their own security control center. They have guards patrolling. They have their own cameras within their suites. But then they need to tie back to us,” Lea says.
Recent workplace violence incidents have shifted attitudes toward security in multitenant buildings, with stakeholders welcoming additional layers of security, Aviv says. Those cases have pushed security systems like credentialing and registration to become more normalized for Class A and even some Class B buildings in urban environments.
“It’s no longer considered a hindrance or a hardship anymore. It’s now considered to be a requirement,” Aviv notes.
But that might not last, Rieder cautions. The patience for onerous additional measures could wear thin as headlines about incidents fade. The lasting changes will depend on security policies that tenants believe will align with their needs in the long run. Security must be willing to adapt, listen, and advocate for the changes that will resonate with those stakeholders.
Balancing Needs
When it comes to advocating for, implementing, and supporting security measures, one of the challenges in getting tenants to understand the larger need for a solution is that they tend to have a narrow view of the building's operations, limiting their overall security awareness.
“Because they only see their sliver of the building, they don’t really know what else is going on within the facility,” Rieder says.
If there’s a tenant on Floor 6 that has experienced a break-in while the offices are closed, the tenants from a different organization on Floor 15 might not be aware of the issue. Floor 15 might remain unaware unless a landlord provides those tenants with security briefings.
“I think that’s one of the challenges with the vertical environment, because people are so isolated in their sliver of the building, it really starts becoming key to push that security knowledge and that boundary as far out to the edge of the building as possible,” Rieder says.
A firm that Rieder previously worked for maintained office space in a New York City building that also housed offices for former U.S. President Bill Clinton. The building’s security would scale up or down depending on whether Clinton would be in the office on a given day—which would impact all other tenants.
To counter aggravation against what could appear to be random increased security, the building used a tactic that Rieder now recommends to his clients: a security council. At a monthly meeting, every building stakeholder could send a representative to keep abreast of updates from building security and others—including information about new tenants or visitors that might impact security in the lobby or access control measures. “It gave everyone an opportunity to break those divides down and be able to hear about what’s going on,” Rieder recalls.
Interestingly, disclosing relevant building-wide information to representatives helped both the tenants and building security. Each firm in the building began taking more ownership in supporting building security, according to Rieder. Tenants and landlords became more aware and communicative about potential issues, such as noting if something like a package or person seemed out of place.
Lea adds that the monthly tenant meetings for his firm’s buildings give his team a chance to frequently meet with tenants’ corporate security representatives and remain aware of operations and developments that could affect a building.
Providing stakeholders with additional information is also crucial when implementing new security measures. Those measures, even if it’s only updating an existing element, should be communicated to stakeholders. Not only does this help smooth out any rough edges after an installation, it ensures that information is coming from security and property managers instead of courtesy of the rumor mill—boosting trust in those authorities. Afterall, no one will appreciate discovering they are no longer on time to work when they walk into the building on Monday morning and have to join the line caused by a new, previously unannounced set of turnstiles.
“If that’s not conveyed to me as a visitor, I’m getting there and thinking it’s the worst building I’ve ever been to,” Rieder says.
Instead, communication and education allow security to work with stakeholders and deliver a smoother experience. Depending on a party’s security appetite, a tenant might be able to preregister visitors, asking security to provide a visitor with a temporary electronic badge before the visitor enters the building—saving time and circumventing aggravation.
Education and communication should extend beyond updates and installations. Doing so effectively loops back to the need to understand the tenant and tailor security and risk messaging to the audience.
Rieder recalls a multitenant building where most tenants worked in the arts, including an entire floor of music developers. Rieder and his team supported a larger lobby project, involving new turnstiles and visitor management elements. To prepare tenants, the property manager hired a videographer to record an instructional video that detailed the new entry process that visitors would go through. But the video—similar in tone to a pre-flight instructional clip—didn’t resonate with tenants. The same video and information were reformatted into a cartoon, and the script was injected with a fresh dose of humor to take the instructional stiffness out.
“All of a sudden, everyone was like, ‘This is great,’” he says. “The best comment we got was, ‘Can we forward this to our visitor?’”
Understanding your audience can also help security highlight its worth and advocate for measures that tenants might not initially support. While one tenant may be a larger corporation with its own corporate security department, another tenant might be a much smaller organization that does not see the need for certain security solutions or procedures. With the latter, “it’s a lot of explaining the security processes to them and why these are important,” Lea says. “…You as the building security have to help them manage that.”
Knowing a tenant’s culture, goals, and concerns allows security a better chance of pointing to how a security solution can dovetail with the tenant’s business needs. For example, if someone is paying closer attention to overhead costs, it can help to highlight how a solution or process can allow the building to manage insurance rates for the property, which in turn keeps costs down for landlords or tenants, turning security from a hindrance into an investment.
Sara Mosqueda is associate editor at Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or send her an email at [email protected].
