Key Takeaways
- Don’t skip or skimp on an after-action review (AAR); returning to business as usual without it leaves your business open to avoidable vulnerabilities in the future.
- Avoid corporate blind spots by bringing cross-functional stakeholders to the AAR table, particularly those from affected locations.
- Use real-time tracking for emergency expenses like temporary security officers and generators to prevent financial headaches after the fact.
- An AAR is not just a list of lessons learned; insights must be actionable and tied to a designated owner for accountability.
After the shock, damage and disruption of a crisis have worn off and store managers and associates are returning to work, it’s tempting to breathe a sigh of relief and return to business as usual. However, doing so causes most retail security teams to miss an invaluable opportunity to assess what worked and avoid what didn’t. That’s where an after-action review (AAR) becomes essential.
What is an After-Action Review for Retail?
An AAR is an important part of ensuring the lessons learned in the moment are documented and kept for future disasters, natural and otherwise. Rushing through or skipping an AAR means wasting the hard moments your team weathered and leaving them vulnerable to avoidable risk in the future.
Recovering and reopening after a natural disaster is a good sign to shoppers, but the post-crisis phase is the time to turn snap judgments and in-the-moment incident responses into a roadmap for business continuity and disaster-related behavioral threat recognition.
How Do You Run a Retail After-Action Review Process?
To keep an AAR from becoming too broad, security teams must treat it as a strict data-and-action framework. Instead of performing a perfunctory audit, a thorough AAR can function as a strategy for the future. This means zooming in and out simultaneously: analyzing big-picture logistics and the most granular operational details. Vulnerabilities must be identified and tied to a corrective action with an owner for accountability.
What Data Should Retail Security Teams Collect?
Before everyone comes to the table, teams need to be prepared with:
- Incident logs, dispatch timestamps and any available surveillance footage.
- Real-time security data (e.g., security officer tracking and vendor deployment metrics).
- Invoicing and financial tracking for ad hoc emergency expenses (e.g., temporary security officers, emergency boarding or backup generators).
NEED A CLEARER POST-CRISIS SECURITY PLAN?
Protos Security helps retail teams assess what happened, close coverage gaps and prepare for the next disruption.
Who’s Involved in an After-Action Review for Retail?
It’s a mistake to limit AAR participants to corporate leadership. Siloed executives can have blind spots that localized staff know best. Consider who may have been missing at the initial strategy table and course-correct at the post-crisis table. Cross-functional perspectives need to be able to speak to:
- Store operations: What failed and what succeeded when plans were operationalized.
- Asset protection: Physical security threats, outside vulnerabilities and response timing.
- Facility integrity and supply chain: How a location fared physically, as well as real-time vendor relations.
- HR and corporate communications: Focusing on the immediate aftermath and longer-term impact, as well as the speed and quality of internal and public messaging.
What Questions Should Be Asked at the AAR?
The person facilitating the AAR should guide the cross-functional team through a few standard questions that can be documented with the benefit of different perspectives:
- What happened, and how did it differ from what we expected to happen?
- What went right, and what specifically influenced that success?
- What went wrong, and where were those breakdowns in protocols or communication?
- What will we do differently next time?
How Do You Turn AAR Findings into Action for Next Time?
Research from the National Policing Institute states that command, coordination and resource deployment failures are the most common systemic vulnerabilities during a crisis. That’s why doing an AAR is only one part of the process; the findings have to be documented and incorporated into your future security strategy in order to become effective.
Assign Corrective Actions to Secure the Future
Every lesson learned during the AAR must be translated into an action item assigned to a specific owner with a deadline, whether that’s updating a vendor agreement or revising store-level security officer training. In every case, assigning an owner ensures accountability and actionability before the next crisis.
Protos Security is here to help leaders rethink their basic security strategies and prioritize an AAR. “A wise CEO in banking said, ‘Better of more, not more the same,’” says Gail Funk, our Divisional Vice President, National Operations. “We’re going to look at everything, take the positive, and look at where we can make that better.” Learning from past crisis expenses and experiences is a vital part of planning for the future.
RETAIL READINESS: PROTECTING BUSINESSES BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER NATURAL DISASTERS AND EMERGENCIES
Get real-world perspectives from business continuity, disaster recovery and guarding operations leaders at Holman, Verizon and Protos in this panel discussion.
