For the employers, CCTV is a very useful instrument for many reasons. Some of them are obvious: preventing crimes like thefts, helping the police and watching the employees.
Nevertheless, there are numerous aspects and elements making CCTV not only useful, but even invaluable. If you consider all the advantages, you will realize that CCTV is a system that every manager should employ. Below you can find a few of the hidden advantages for employer to own CCTV.
- CCTV can protect employees. In lots of jobs the employees are vulnerable to either physical or verbal attacks from the public. Often, in stressful situations, customers may lash out at a company representative. If the employee knows they are being watched by CCTV camera, he or she will try to minimize these cases and stay calmly deal. Moreover, it is able to protect the employees against false allegations that might be common in some areas of business.
- CCTV helps prevent crime, of course. The hidden cameras are able to help investigators to identify how a crime happened and to spot it in action. However, they are more likely to prevent the crime from occurring simply by letting everyone know they are being watched.
- The cameras can also help prevent employee theft. It won’t occur if customers or members of public pocket goods: in fact, often it’s employees themselves who are stealing. According to statistics gathered by focus groups, most usually the reason for this is not need but rather opportunity. So, if your personnel know they are being watched that can make it far less likely.
- Then CCTV can help employee satisfaction – if you do experience a fair amount of employee theft, this may be because your staff isn’t happy with the work and lashes out at the company in such a way. Watching CCTV recordings may give you an idea of how to streamline your business and ensure your employees enjoy their work.
- As it was said above, CCTV can help settle disputes. In some cases, when a customer has a complaint about your service, there are some doubts and you are not sure who’s in the wrong. For instance, the clients like claiming that they have been short-changed or purposefully sold bad goods. In addition, they may try to claim that an accident which occurred on your premises happened because of a breach in health and safety regulations. Although it is actually hard to identify the cases where it’s true and where it’s fabricated, sometimes just mentioning that you have a record on CCTV may make the con artists back down.
- The cameras are effective in placing blame. It means that in the event of a serious mistake or theft, it may appear that the employees need to be reprimanded or pointed in the right direction.
- CCTV is convenient for keeping records, as it can act as an automated system able to allow you to prove to customers and check yourself that, for example, their shipments were indeed deployed. Precedently, storing recordings was quite a problem, either on magnetic tape or VHS tapes. A lot of the units on the market these days use CDR technology, which allows to store many hours of surveillance on a single disk. This may be convenient for law enforcement officials and security staff in office buildings and manufacturing facilities.
- Finally, CCTV is able to inspire confidence, because it creates a safe feeling environment. It is able to allow you to spot crimes against clients (especially in bars) or accidents on the work premises.
This wasn’t the full list of the advantages of CCTV. Overall, it is a very convenient thing, because the systems are kept everywhere. This means that if a crime is committed, the culprit will be eventually caught.
The most obvious benefit is that the unit is no subject to the failure of any type of wiring, because CCTV cameras use wireless technology in order to accomplish their task. The absence of wiring which may fail or be cut means that there’s virtually no chance of something going wrong with the system, and even a clever thief won’t be able to circumvent the camera by severing the connection. Except ripping the entire unit out of place, there’s nothing else that would slow the unit down.
One more advantage of CCTV is the clarity of the images captured. Today, most of the wireless cameras produce a high-resolution image which makes it very easy to identify faces and other physical characteristics. So, the CCTV systems are perfect for use as part of the security for research facilities and similar establishments. Security staff will be able to easily monitor all activities within range of the cameras and note any suspicious behavior, while at the same time getting a clear image of the person behaving strangely.
Finally, CCTV cameras are in most cases less expensive than people would think. Actually, today you can buy wireless units cheaper than many of the wired counterparts on the market. Taking into account that wireless cameras require much easier installation, it comes as no surprise that more and more people today are choosing wireless security cameras.
However, there are potential drawbacks of wireless systems in comparison to other CCTV cameras: they might be costly, fail to work (if they are set up in wrong places) and manipulate with people’s privacy. Lack of standards is also a disadvantage – various IP cameras are able to encode video differently or use a different programming interface, which means that a particular system model might be deployed only with compatible recording solutions.
Non-professionals may also face a technical barrier, because installation for wireless camera requires some complicated network setting like IP address, DDNS, router setting and port forwarding.
Finally, wireless cameras are suspected by some to be vulnerable to hacking, and hoaxing through the Internet (multiple cases of false bomb threats being called in as hoaxers watch on web). Worse still, the criminals can hack into a facility’s surveillance system and observe security measures and staff, thus facilitating criminal acts.
