2024 Conference
SCHEDULE
Security Meets Hospitality: Crime Prevention Through Collaboration With Staff and Visitors
11:45 – 12:45 p.m.
| Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024 at The BroadSecurity strategies often translate into an iron fist or kid gloves approach, a philosophical dichotomy that grows every year. It seems like you either lose the notion of customer service or you sacrifice efficacy. We chose to merge security concepts with hospitality to design a new (and more holistic) security policy. Collaborating with all museum employees – including security guards, reception staff, shop assistants, and guides – we took up the challenge to make security hospitable and hospitality secure. The resulting concepts were applied in several Ghent museums. Our municipal museums strive to be at the forefront of security and art crime prevention but are located in a country with a famously high-risk appetite concerning these topics. Accessibility, convenience, and enjoyment for the public remain our priorities. We will show through three tactics how we seek to instill responsibility, collaboration, and situational awareness in our team and museum visitors. We’ll talk about nudging, empowerment, and shared worth. The involvement of the staff from the very beginning of this exercise resulted in a heightened awareness for most of them and a better understanding of their functioning within the security strategy.
