Securing Your Building Site Office Against Theft

Construction site theft is a big concern as not only does it cause financial loss, but can also lead to a loss of trust in the reputation of your business. Your site office may not store your most valuable site equipment but you may still lose digital equipment, legal documents, petty cash and be at risk from cybercrime. On top of this, dealing with the damage caused by a break-in, whether attempted or "successful", is undesirable and will cause a hike in your insurance premiums too. Read our tips on building site security for your offices.

Lock items away

Although this sounds obvious, it is surprising how easy it is to forget to secure all valuables away inside the office before locking up. Yes, it does take extra time when you're already in a hurry to leave, and you might easily be tempted to think that one night not following the lock up drill will be fine. But a break-in could happen at any time so why leave your premises at risk for the sake of saving a few minutes in time? If you have a safe in your site office then use it! Pop your important documents and tools and gadgets in there as habit upon leaving. Lock the shutters and use all the locks on the doors every night. Even if you have a good fence around the building site, police statistics indicate that shockingly as much as 85% of construction site theft is employee-related, especially amongst temporary workers.

Control access

No one wants to cast suspicion on their own staff, but sadly as statics have shown many break-ins are an inside job. Control access and cause least offence by instilling a systematic check-in/check-out routine with key holders, making sure you only provide keys to those who need them and their whereabouts is always accountable. If the same rule applies to all, no one is going to get upset or contest it.

Other building site security measures

These proven deterrents will protect the whole site, not just your site office:

• Install CCTV - If your container office resides on a site already covered by CCTV, you're good to go. If not, a convenient and very visible method is to attach a CCTV pole to your container, with the camera on top. Just making it visible to potential thieves is enough to make them reconsider breaking-in.


• Install an alarm system
Fitting an alarm system in your site office is recommended. Alarms can include motion detection, so it will go off even without someone getting inside the container. GSM alarms are designed specifically for shipping containers and allow for remote monitoring - it's no use your alarm going off if no one is around to hear it!


• Make use of effective lighting - two-thirds of burglaries take place at night, so ensure the area surrounding your site office is well-lit, as burglars hate being caught in the spot light.


• Signage - let people know the site is protected! You can have all the protections for you building site offices, but if you don't advertise them, they won't be effective as a deterrent.

Whatever measures you take for your building site security, there are no 100% guarantees against theft, but you won't be left wishing you'd done more.

Interested in our secure ModiBox® site office? Contact us today on 0800 061 2575 to discuss your requirements, or use our Quick Quote form.