Quality, Compliance, and Clarity: E&T Guarding done the TKC way

Outsourcing your short term guarding requirements is often met with hesitation, and rightly so. For many businesses, entrusting such a critical function to a third-party provider can raise serious concerns over compliance, quality, and ethics. Questions like Will the guard turn up? Are they being paid fairly? Will they do the job to a good standard – and how will I know? are more than hypothetical; they directly impact your peace of mind and operational security.

With over 20 years in the security industry under my belt, I understand these doubts better than most. I’ve witnessed first-hand the frustration and risk that stem from sub-standard practices, and I know how critical it is for businesses to feel they’re in safe hands. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to reimagine outsourcing as not just a solution, but a strategic advantage.

When I moved into the role of Guarding Director, I was intent on the department maintaining rigorous standards and ethical practices. But not only that, I wanted to make sure our clients understood how our technology gave them transparency and control. By addressing pain points head-on, I felt we had a real opportunity to get businesses to trust outsourced guarding – not as a compromise, but as a way to elevate their security operations. Here’s how we do it.

Tackling compliance and quality challenges

Managing roster gaps or securing urgent cover is a big challenge, but when outsourcing becomes your only solution, concerns around inconsistent practices can erode trust, leaving you nervous about whether standards will be upheld. It has taken trial and error, and a whole lot of learning, but we’ve worked relentlessly to remove those doubts as much as possible.

Over the past 25 years, TKC have built a carefully vetted network of 200 local, ACS-accredited service partners with 11,000 qualified officers. This robust, regulated network enables us to respond quickly to urgent needs across the UK, without compromising on standards. To this point, what sets us apart is our zero-tolerance policy on unauthorised subcontracting by our partners.

Every officer deployed through TKC is directly employed by an ACS-accredited provider, paid through PAYE, and fully qualified with an SIA license.

Sean Hargreaves – Guarding Director, The Keyholding Company

These aren’t just claims – over time, we’ve rolled in rigorous enforcement mechanisms. The guarding team conducts documentation and compliance tracking via DeepStream (a compliance platform) and proactively manages partners through face-to-face audits, spot checks and manual checks on uniform standards, fatigue management and officer competency.

Tech-driven transparency

A piece of feedback that comes up again and again from clients is that there is nothing worse than being left in the dark, wondering if everything is going to plan. That’s why we built a process that allows you to monitor every aspect of your guarding deployments in real time on our platform (which won a UK Business Tech Award last year). But this didn’t happen overnight.

The first step was to make sure you received a booking confirmation within 60 minutes. This was hugely successful, so we tackled the next challenge which was to make clear who would be doing the job. We made sure service partners could upload the officer’s SIA license credentials so this information could be viewed ahead of time.

Booking an officer couldn't be simpler — Booking a shift couldn’t be easier

We then kept bringing in new features we knew would help you feel in control, like book on/off locations being in place between active shift timings and sending notifications to officers – and TKC – if the site boundary is left. An officer’s movements can now be tracked in real-time and when the shift finishes you receive a job report which shows who’s been on site and whether they encountered any issues.

What’s next is to roll out our Electronic Daily Occurrence Book (eDOB) so you can track every task and patrol completed on-site as it happens.

Quality assurance baked into every stage of the process

Delivering exceptional service isn’t just about successfully deploying guards – it’s about embedding quality assurance into every step.

Sean Hargreaves

Something really important to me was to include a human layer at key points in the process. From the moment an officer is booked, our tech-enabled processes get to work, but not without hands-on oversight by the guarding team so everything is handled with precision. Our Guarding app (which took a huge amount of collaboration with our tech team) is key to this.

Before a shift begins, officers have full visibility to site and duty requirements via the app. This includes risk assessments, site-specific guidelines, and health and safety protocols, giving officers information to perform duties effectively. When an officer arrives at the site, they verify their credentials through the app by uploading photos of their SIA license, uniform, and location. This creates a secure, trackable record and gives instant visibility into the assigned officer’s qualifications. Our guarding team further strengthens this by manually checking submissions to ensure everything is in order.

Two members of the TKC Guarding team — Michael and Daniel, two of our Guarding Team

Once on-site, officers complete a Point of Work Risk Assessment (PoWRA) via the app to identify and address any site-specific risks. If they have concerns, they can call the guarding team directly for guidance and immediate support. These steps are critical to ensuring the safety of the officer and site whilst providing a clear framework for compliant operations.

Beyond deployment, we mandate that our partners conduct monthly Site Visit Reports (SVRs) to deliver an additional layer of quality assurance. The great thing about this is that the SVR’s are completed via the app, and cover not just guard competency but also welfare, training, and on-site facilities. You have full visibility into completed SVRs for extra confidence in the service being delivered, and you can give direct feedback to the partner and their officer, which is fed into the report.

To add another human layer of oversight, the guarding team conducts hundreds of quality spot checks each month, monitoring SVRs to ensure they are being completed regularly and to the highest standard, reinforcing accountability at every level.

A partnership built on trust

Outsourcing security guards doesn’t have to raise alarm bells. In fact, it can be your secret weapon.

We know there is always work to do and opportunities to improve service delivery, but we’ve come a really long way. My team’s extensive industry experience, combined with a tech-led approach, has allowed us to deliver outsourced guarding that is ethical, compliant and reliable.

This year we hit a 99% fulfilment rate of accepted guarding shifts and 85% of our guarding clients are repeat bookers. To me though, these are far more than just vanity metrics. They highlight the thought, time and hard work we’ve put into creating an efficient service our clients not only value, but above all trust.

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