At Connecteam, we want your setup to be swift and clean. As customer success managers we took our experience from working with hundreds of security companies worldwide and created this step-by-step tutorial to get your company set up to PERFECTION. You can expect this guide to go through all of the steps needed to get your account up and running with real-world examples of how each feature or capability can work for a Security company your size. Like Connecteam, this guide works as an all-in-one solution to your HR & Skills Hub Set Up. While there are many other articles found here on our Help Center we have designed this guide, particularly for security companies of your kind and it should walk you through your complete setup step by step.

Don't worry! We’ve got all of the first steps to make your life easy and Connecteam work for you! 🤩

After reading this guide you should be able to start fully operating the platform you will learn how to:

💡Tip: Anytime you see blue text in this article it is a link or menu of links to other areas inside this guide. If you're looking for something specific, or you don't finish the setup in one day, you can always find what you need or pick up where you left off by clicking on the relevant topic.

Wait! Did you sign up for multiple hubs? If you already received a setup guide and know how to add users and create smart groups, then click here to move onto the next section.

The first steps when setting up your account is going to be adding your users and creating your smart groups. In this section we will walk you through:

Custom fields are information fields found inside the user's profile, and are filled with information specific to each employee. Custom fields are a smart way to identify and group your workforce, allowing you to customize what information is important to your company in order to organize their users. Examples of custom fields can be Position, Department, Birthday, Uniform Size, and much more.

We recommend planning out the information you want to know about your employees, and creating these custom fields prior to adding the employees themselves. This will allow you to update all their information when adding them and save you tons of time later.

To add a custom field head over the users tab, and enter the employees detail page then select Add Field and choose the type of field, name it, and press save. In the example below you can see we created a custom field named position. In my company the positions will be Security Officer, Guard, Patrol Officer, Field Manager\Supervisor. Many security companies also create a custom field for the team\department.

Please note that there are 3 default fields you will never be able to edit or delete; these are First Name, Last Name, and Mobile Phone.

💡A Customer Success Manager’s Tip: We recommend using the drop down custom field type when creating your custom fields, which allow you to create a list of information to select from when filling out the custom field. This will simplify things later if using smart groups, which are filtered by custom fields. The filter of smart groups is case sensitive, and here at connecteam we have encountered numerous companies whose users were not added into the proper smart groups because of typos made when filling out a users custom field. Using a drop down custom field avoids this possibility right from the start!

Once you have set up your custom fields it's time to move on to adding users. After all that's what you came here for - managing your workforce.

To add users simply navigate your way to the Users Tab on the left - hand and click on it. Once inside select Add Users and fill in the requested details. You can also use the menu on the right side to add more details then the ones which appear here which are only the required fields. After filling out the details make sure the Send an invite button is selected in order to invite them to the platform.

💡Tip: If you have many users, you can import them in bulk

Smart groups are groups based on rules. All the users who meet the rule will automatically be added to the group and those who don't will not be added. It's as simple as that. A smart groups filter is based on custom fields - which we previously created.

For security companies smart groups are hugely beneficial and allow you to create different teams with different qualifications\position\licenses. Also many security companies create groups for each location\site\client.

Bigger companies that have a management level, usually create a group also for that. For example you can group your staff by their ability to do specific jobs like- armed\unarmed job.

Since Connecteam's features, assets, jobs in the schedule, chats and much more can be assigned to smart groups, grouping them now will help us later on with things like scheduling correctly (and much more).

Step 1: Navigate to the smart group's category on the left sidebar

Step 2: First, add a Segment

Step 3: Use the + Add a group button from inside the Segment to create a group and then name the group.

Step 4: Set the Filter. First, choose the Custom field, and then finally select or enter the criteria that the group will be defined by.

In the example below you can see how I create a group of only my staff who are qualified as guards.

Now that you know the basics of setting up your account it's time to move on to the features related to the operations hub.

This hub consists of 7 features, but for security companies we find that Documents, Recognitions & Rewards to be most beneficial. Below we will go over how to set these up and how to utilize each capability as a big-sized security companies.

Connecteam’s Document feature lets your employees upload documents directly through the app. Whether it's a Federal W-4 form or a new employee hire form all the documents pertaining to your entire company can be found directly in the Documents tab. No more searching file folders to find that one document. Have all required certificates and licenses for your security business in one place!

After reading this guide you should be able to start fully operating the platform you will learn how to:

When assigning a new Document to your employees, they will be able to find it under the Profile Tab, clicking the Employee documents section. There they will find all the required documents requested from them, as well as the status of each submission, and of course upload new documents to the platform!In the example below, you will be able to see the full user side, on how to access the employee documents section, and how easy it is to upload new documents for you to review

The document feature can be found in your left sidebar. To begin, enter the feature, and click on create a pack. This will bring you to the document settings, where you will begin setting up your document packs and adding documents.

Document packs are groups of documents. An easy way to think of them are as folders, each one for a different set of documents. These can be assigned either to individual users or to smart groups - based on the position, branch, or more. You can add as many document packs as you like each containing the same or different documents.

To add a new document pack, click on the Add a New Document Packet, name the packet, select and add the relevant documents, assign it to the relevant users or smart group, and then save changes.
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Now that you have created a document pack let's add documents to it. In order to add documents to the pack, you first need to create documents and add them to the document list. Below we will go over how to do this.

Real-life Example: A security company that we work with, created a pack for all Licenses, and in it added a document for Gun license and a document for Driving licenses.

💡A Customer Success Managers Tip: Adding more document packs can be done exactly how you did it when adding the document pack and documents above. Note that each pack can be assigned to its own smart group or users, have its own admins, and can contain different documents.

Expiration dates are found inside the setting of an individual document. They are specific to that document. To access these enter the Document feature, go to the document settings in the top right corner, and navigate to a specific document's settings.

At the bottom, you will see the option to set an expiration date. You can check this off to enable it.

After enabling the expiration date it's time to decide which kind of date you want to set the options are either per a document or per an entry. Below we will go over both options.
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This option sets the expiration date to be per a document, meaning that regardless of when a user uploaded a document. Once the expiration date arrives all documents uploaded will need to be uploaded again. This option could be great for example, for W4 form that expire to all employees at the same date .

In this capability, you also have the ability to set the frequency at which documents expire. These are every two weeks, every month, and yearly.

Expiration dates per entry are dates that are septic to a specific submission. These are not set by you (the admin) they are set by the user or admin when uploading the document. This option could be great for example, if you have users uploading documents that expire on different dates, such as a weapon license or driver license.

Let's take a look at how using these options looks from the user’s perspective. In the example below you can see that when uploading my license, I have to set an expiration date.

💡A Customer Success Manager's Tip: If you set your expiration date to be per a document: Then within one week of the expiration date set you will see a countdown at the top of the document panel.
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Connecteam’s Rewards feature is designed to serve as a tool for managers that want to incentivize and motivate their guards. The rewards feature is an amazing way to show appreciation to your team in the form of tokens, which can be used to purchase gift cards. Let's get started on the basics of this amazing feature!

In this section we will talk about:

Tokens are a digital form of money that users receive when you reward them.

Your guards can use tokens to buy gift cards at a variety of places, like coffee shops or restaurants. They can be purchased on the Connecteam platform, making it easy for you to ensure you always have enough tokens when needed.

To buy tokens simply press the purchase tokens button and select the relevant bundle.

To send tokens follow these steps:

That's it! You have rewarded your hard-working guard!

In the card library, you can decide exactly which gift cards users can purchase with their tokens. If you are a large company this allows admins and owners to ensure users are not purchasing gift cards from your competitors.

To set your desired cards enter the card library and toggle on the country you are in and all the vendors which offer gift cards will appear. Here you can toggle on or the cards which will be available to users.

In the Security industry retaining your employees is crucial!

Employee turnover costs a company both time and money. Research shows that companies that engage positively with their security team and recognize employee accomplishments have lower turnover rates. For this reason, using the recognition feature to acknowledge your guard’s accomplishments, celebrate wins, and promote company values is so crucial!

In this sections we will go over:

The first step to empowering your workforce is to activate the recognition feature. Navigate to the left sidebar, select recognitions, and press activate. It's as simple as that.

Sending a recognition is super easy! Simply follow these steps:

While we offer you tons of badges to choose from, we also know that sometimes you may want to create a custom badge that better fits your company's needs. To create a custom badge simply enter the Badge Library, select create a badge, pick your icon, name your badge and choose the topic. In the example below you can see I created the 'Guards of the month' badge for one of my best guards.

A real-world Example: One company we worked with created a custom badge called Guard of the Month They used this recognition to recognize employees who go above and beyond each month. It was a great way to boost morale by regularly awarding this badge to a deserving employee each month. It also gives your users a healthy dose of competition that will only incentivize them to work a little harder.

In this article we went over everything you would need as a Security company to get connecteam Hr & Skills hub set up and customized to meet your company's needs. While setting up and adapting to a new system might bring challenges and periods of adjustment for you and your employees here at Connecteam we are always here to help.

You can always reach out to our LIVE support team 🙋 (at the bottom right corner of your screen). They reply in under 5 mins to ANY question!

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