At bp, it is more dangerous to work in retail than it is in refining or mining. That is not a headline designed to alarm. It is a statistic Emily Milner uses to help leaders truly understand what their frontline teams face every day. You control who enters a refinery. In retail, you open the doors and say come on in.
Emily Milner is the ANZ Country Security Manager at bp, overseeing security across retail, aviation, terminals, and office sites in Australia and New Zealand. In this episode, she joins Auror's Sean Singh to talk about a career spanning nearly two decades, the realities of violence in retail, and what it actually means to put people first, not just as a value statement, but as a daily practice.
Key takeaways from this episode:
- Numbers alone do not convey the impact of retail violence. Getting leaders to understand the human cost, not just the incident count, is one of the hardest and most important parts of the job.
- KPIs shape culture. If your metrics only track money, that is what your teams will focus on. bp's goal of zero life-changing incidents sets a different tone from the top.
- Psychological safety is as important as physical safety. Celebrating the right behaviors, not punishing the wrong ones, is what creates a culture where people report, recover, and stay.
The human face behind the numbers
Repeat offenders cause the majority of harm and loss experienced by retailers in both Australia and New Zealand. They are also more likely to use weapons, with repeat offenders in Australia 6X more likely and those in New Zealand 5X more likely. The likelihood of repeat offenders showing threatening behavior is also greater, up to 3X more likely to be threatening in ANZ.
Emily knows this better than most, and she also knows that presenting statistics to leadership is not enough.
"Getting leaders to walk in the shoes of the team members, that's actually something else. In retail, we open our doors and we say, come on in. We can't control that to a point. So when we are talking to our leaders, we need to really make sure we've got a human face to some of these numbers. We've had incidents and we haven't had an injury. That's great. But be aware that there are other impacts. People's ability to feel safe in their place of work, that's really key as well."
Providing real examples and compelling comparisons can cut through when presenting numbers to upper management. In this case, data showed uncontrolled access can, in some cases, pose a larger threat than heavy machinery.
KPIs that reflect what you actually value
Emily has worked in environments where financial return is the dominant lens, and she is clear-eyed about what happens when that is the only measure that gets talked about. At bp, the conversation starts somewhere different.
"A return on investment is always really important, but how you measure that is also really interesting. One of the key things at bp is we want to have zero life-changing incidents. When we talk about KPIs, they do need to align with your values as a business. If you are continually talking about money, that will be the thing that people focus on. Even if you say people are what we're focused on, if you're talking about money all the time, they'll recognize that maybe people aren't the focus."
Zero life-changing incidents does not mean expecting zero reports. Emily is explicit about that. A site with no reports is a site where people are not speaking up. The goal is to create the conditions where reporting feels safe and supported, and where the number of serious incidents genuinely goes down over time.
Supporting retail security teams psychologically
The hardest part of Emily's work is watching team members absorb the psychological toll of what happens in stores and trying to support every single one of them.
"When I think about the unfortunate piece around psychological health in retail, our team has to deal with some pretty harsh stuff. When you are trying to support from a place of empathy and you see team members struggling with the day to day, that's really, really hard to deal with. I guess that's where my role comes in from a strategic point of view. We have to look at the overall and then how do we uplift for everybody, every day."
Her approach to building that culture is practical. When reviewing footage after a robbery, the focus is on what people did right, retreating to the safe haven, hitting the duress button, calling for help. That is what gets celebrated. It is a small shift that signals something important: we are watching to support you, not to catch you in a mistake.
Emily's career has taken her from a temporary loss prevention role in the UK to leading security across one of the world's largest companies. What has stayed constant is the question she starts with every day: how do we keep our people safe?
Watch the full episode to hear Emily on the future of CCTV and AI in retail security, what the UK retail market can learn from Australia's approach, and the deescalation training moment that reminded her exactly why she does this work.
