In Depth

Fear Factor

By Daintry Duffy

Page 2

People will also respond to the same security measures in different ways, says Phill Banks, a former Canadian Mountie and current head of Deloitte & Touche's security management group. "There's always a balance," he says. "Some see the need to present an ID card as a measure of safety; others see it as just another manifestation of Big Brother."

The recent attention to security has even spawned its own new psychological disordercalled Security Obsession Syndrome, or, appropriately enough, SOS. Sufferers of SOS are easy to identify: They exhibit an extreme preoccupation with personal safety, they constantly evaluate the performance of security personnel, and they fixate on potentially suspicious people on airplanes or in public places. "These people are obsessive," says professor Cary Cooper, a behavioral psychologist at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. "They go overboard interpreting verbal and behavioral cues that take them way beyond reality." It's an anxiety disorder that has always existed in a small percentage of the population, but according to Cooper, it has increased dramaticallyup from about 1 percent to 5 percent of the population in the past two years.

In the workplace, as in society, security threats are not static. The risk levelwhether from an office worker stealing laptops or from the proximity of a facility to a metropolitan areachanges over time. An escalation in security might require employees to report all unfamiliar persons in the office or take extra precautions in locking up corporate assets and their own valuables. If after several weeks the threat doesn't materialize or the perpetrator is caught, the CSO should follow up by communicating a reduction in the level of risk while reinforcing the idea that certain best practices behaviors are always a good idea. Employees gain confidence in the corporate security program when they see the security level change in response to circumstances, because it shows that the company is paying attention.Psychologically Savvy Security How do you strike a balance between security measures that act as a deterrent to the criminal element but make employees fearful and uneasy? "There is a certain level of physical deterrence that is desirable, that says this site is protected," says Martha Droge, a landscape architect and urban planner with Ayers/Saint/Gross. "However any organized [criminal] group will do research, and even if security is subtle, they will detect it."

One psychologically savvy approach is community policinga practice that law enforcement has found to be successful. With the guidance of police departments, community policing encourages neighbors to keep an eye on each other's houses and properties and report any anomalies to the authorities. "The best protection is community," says Richard Farson, psychologist and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. "People can be formed into a community that cares about each other and, as a byproduct, notices when something is wrong."