By Ian Ellison, Workplace Geeks
Listen to episode two now: How can we make the places in which we live and work safer?
In the first episode of this new series, we took listeners somewhere few people ever get to go. A unique laboratory buried over one kilometre beneath the North York Moors, deep inside a working mine. What we discovered there was not just an extraordinary workplace, but a familiar truth: high-performing places flourish when passionate people from different backgrounds are trusted and given room to grow.
Episode two of The Mitie Podcast continues our quest to understand what makes a place truly high performing. This time, we’re not heading underground. We’re going behind the scenes of something that affects all of us – every day, often without us even realising – to explore how safety is created, maintained, and increasingly co-produced across society.
Now, if that last sentence made you stop and think, I doubt you’ll be alone. It takes a bit of getting your head around. Let’s begin with a simpler question: what makes the places that we live and work in safer?
Safety as a shared responsibility
It’s easy to think of safety as someone else’s job. Policing, emergency services, local authorities, central government and the justice system. These institutions have rightly sat at the centre of how we think about public protection in modern society. But the reality facing us today is more complex.
Crime has evolved. Threats are more widespread. Our public services are under sustained pressure. At the same time, our workplace expectations have changed. Organisations now need to take responsibility not just for what happens inside their buildings, but for how people arrive, leave, and move through the world.
What’s becoming clear is that no single organisation, public or private, can meet these challenges alone. Which is why collaboration matters more than ever.
Inside the ISOC
To understand how that collaboration works in practice, my co-host Chris headed to Northampton to visit Mitie’s Intelligence Security Operations Centre, or ISOC. From the outside, it’s unremarkable. A typical building on a typical business park. Inside, it functions like a living system with the three interdependent elements that any future-focused security service depends on: intelligence, technology, and people.
The Intelligence Hub monitors vast volumes of open-source data, identifying patterns, risks, and emerging issues in real time. The Security Operations Centre turns that intelligence into action, supporting client retail environments, alongside frontline personnel. With this sits a national operations function, coordinating Mitie’s guarding resources and making sure the right people are in the right places at the right times.
What struck me listening back to this episode is that the ISOC isn’t a linear process. Information doesn’t flow neatly from A to B, then B to C. It moves constantly, in all directions. From the ground up, the top down, and from the centre out. It’s also not about watching everything. It’s about knowing what matters, when it matters, and to whom.
And crucially, much of this intelligence doesn’t just serve individual clients. It contributes to a wider understanding of risk that can benefit communities beyond any single organisation.
Shifting societal expectations
Integrated intelligence, technology and people matter. But this episode also uncovers something deeper. Sometimes, societal expectations change suddenly, and painfully. The abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by a serving Metropolitan Police officer was one of those moments. A tragedy that forced a collective reckoning around women’s safety, trust in institutions, and the everyday risks many people carry without choice.
As Emma Kay, founder of WalkSafe, explains in the episode, the response was immediate and telling. Demand for tools to help people feel safer surged overnight. Not because the risks were new, but because they were suddenly hard to ignore. In other words, what changed was not just awareness, but expectation. With this comes a different level of employer proactivity and support, soon to become law.
From reaction to prevention
WalkSafe began as a personal safety app. But its partnership with Mitie’s Safer Communities provision has transformed it into something broader. Through integration with Mitie systems, WalkSafe can become part of a wider safeguarding ecosystem. One that allows individuals to access support quickly, that organisations can utilise for their people, and that feeds information back into the wider intelligence system.
This is about moving from reactive responses to preventative action. About spotting patterns before harm occurs. And about employers taking reasonable, proactive steps to protect their people, not because legislation demands it, but because society now expects it. As Paul Furnell, formerly an Assistant Chief Constable and now Director of Safeguarding and Safer Communities at Mitie, puts it: “Safer communities isn’t a product, it’s a purpose”.
A more integrated future
If safety efforts only protect isolated sites or organisations, risk is displaced rather than reduced. Safer places can’t be built in silos – true progress comes from collaboration. Between the private and public sector. Between different security providers. Between businesses and law enforcement. Between technology companies and public services. And to achieve this, information needs to be shared responsibly.
The places in which we live and work will only become safer if we stop treating safety as a boundary issue, and start treating it as a shared, societal goal. There are no easy answers or quick fixes here. But the episode shows a clear direction of travel.
Mitie’s ISOC and WalkSafe partnership gives us a glimpse of what a safer future can look like, shaped with purpose and intent.