President’s Message

Permanent Work-from-Home

A glimpse into UL 827 Updates

As many of you know, I have a personal passion for standards. Putting additional focus on standards has been a pillar of my association presidency. I believe adherence to industry standards is unarguably a core competency for professional monitoring. TMA has a long history as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited Standards Development Organization (SDO), producing standards important to central station monitoring. Our members also actively participate in alarm industry standards activities of other influential SDOs, such as UL and NFPA.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses around the globe to quickly rethink most aspects of their business models. As providers of critical life safety services, monitoring center businesses faced unique challenges. In order to provide uninterrupted alarm monitoring services, time-tested service delivery models gave way to tactical implementation of solutions that kept employee health and well-being at the forefront. As the business continuity and employee health challenges were being solved, American National Standards (ANS) that guide us, such as UL 827, were never out of mind.

When UL 827 was initially published and throughout its history of revision, no one foresaw the need to accommodate government-ordered stay-at-home directives, social distancing guidelines and other pandemic-driven safety mandates. The COVID-19 pandemic created challenges even the most forward-looking management team could not have envisioned, much less prepared for. Throughout the transition to emergency work from home (WFH) monitoring, TMA worked closely with UL to formalize short-term emergency WFH guidelines with respect to UL 827 compliance. As TMA’s members sent central station operators and other support professionals to work from home, every day was a new learning experience. As the pandemic grew, member companies continually reviewed their procedures to support their customers while keeping employees safe.

Once the temporary WFH guidelines were issued by UL, TMA’s UL 827 committee, chaired by Vector Security’s Anita Ostrowski, began working on a proposal to UL to make emergency WFH an official part of the UL 827 standard. The lessons-learned from the initial shift to WFH were invaluable to preparing the formal proposal. Subject-matter experts assisted with important technical concerns such as data security, power back-up, communication redundancy. Various options to supervise remote workers were considered. Other unique issues such as inadvertent exposure of security data considering operators were in their home versus a monitoring center were addressed. This teamwork led to UL formally incorporating emergency work from home language in the UL 827 standard that was published in September of last year.

Our efforts with respect to WFH continue. It is not uncommon for businesses to adopt an idea used to solve an immediate problem into their standard operating procedures; such is the case for WFH monitoring. The tactical need for emergency WFH monitoring was quickly adopted as an acceptable part of doing business. Based on the success of the emergency WFH experience, TMA initiated dialogue with UL to consider incorporating permanent WFH solutions into UL 827. I established a special TMA workgroup in May 2020 to develop recommendations for a permanent work-from-home proposal for inclusion in UL 827. TMA Board Member Justin Bailey from AvantGuard Monitoring volunteered to chair the workgroup. Steve Schmit, Senior Staff Engineer, UL, and six other TMA members joined the task force. In speaking with Justin about his role and the work of the task force, he