“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” This is a great, well-known quote that is very applicable to organizational security. After all, keeping your premises secure isn’t about any single action, but about a chain of security measures that come together and form a security process. A failure at any step of the process can have great implications and can significantly undermine the safety of the people who rely on you, as well as the privacy of information in the hands of your organization.
What’s Your Weakest Link?
Here at ID Edge we’ve worked with thousands of companies over the last three decades and have found that for many organizations, the weakest security link has to do with visitor management. It seems that companies have fine tuned employee on-boarding processes quite well with background checks and verification of references. But when it comes to managing visitors, some organizations still fail miserably at even the basics.
For example, if you ever walk into a large office building with multiple tenants, you’ll often notice a security guard at the front desk. With an air of calm professionalism, the security guard will ask you to write your name in the sign-in sheet and then send you on your way to your intended destination. However, in many such cases the guard won’t even ask for your Driver’s License! In such situations, a thief can literally use any name they want and just get into the building with a smile.
We’ve even decided to test this at one point, at a larger venue. At one of our recent tradeshows, we stayed at a hotel that shall remain nameless. This hotel has security guards posted in front of elevators, and patrons have to flash their room key cards to the guard in order to pass through to the elevators.
So we thought, why not try a little experiment… Instead of flashing the card, we simply walked quickly and confidently to the elevators without stopping or acknowledging the guard. And guess what? No one stopped us! No one tapped us on the shoulder and asked us to check our room key. Why? Because too many organizations rely on the judgment of security personnel, rather than security processes with checks and balances.
The bottom line is that when it comes to visitor management, you should never rely exclusively on the judgment of your employees. Instead, you must have intelligently-developed processes to stop unauthorized access and protect people and property…Processes that force security personnel to take certain steps, regardless of their mood that particular day or what a potential criminal might say or do. But how can you achieve this?
Visitor Management Solutions
Let’s look at a few visitor management solutions that can make a huge impact on your organizational security.
- Label Printers: This is a great solution for any organization that has daily visitors. Label printers can be used to make temporary ID badges on adhesive paper, which are then simply applied to clothing. This has several benefits. Firstly, the visitors are easily identifiable though their printed badge. Secondly, the security personnel are forced to ask for the visitor’s Driver’s License to print the temporary label (it’s no longer a judgment call). Lastly, the effectiveness of this measure can be further boosted by requiring anyone who visits to leave their Driver’s License at the counter, to be picked up when leaving and surrendering the temporary label badge. (Browse label printers here!)
- Expiring Visitor Badges: This is a wonderfully-simple technology that builds on regular label badges. The key feature here is that peeling the badge activates a time feature that causes the word “Expired” to appear on the badge after a certain period of time. This makes it impossible for the badge to be re-used later and makes it easy to identify individuals who are no longer authorized to be on the premises and need to check in with security. At the core, this is such a simple feature, but it forces the security process to be proactive. It no longer simply relies on security personnel, but engages the entire organization, as any employee who sees an expired badge will feel justified in questioning the issue and bringing it to the attention of security guards.
- Visitor Management Software: We cringe whenever we see companies use simple sign-in sheets for visitors. It’s such an outdated mode of visitor tracking. And good luck if you need to pull old visitor records or see how many times someone showed up at the building. Going through pages upon pages of sign in sheets and trying to decipher handwriting is incredibly ineffective. That is one of the reasons we strongly recommend visitor management software for organizations that need to keep track of visitors. Software like Asure ID 7 or Lobby Track can standardize the process and make historical information easily accessible. The best part? This software can even store photos of the visitors, which is a huge deterrent for crime and can make it much easier to find a criminal, even if they used a fake ID. (Check out the full software list here!)
Setting Up Your Visitor Management System
The best way to set up your visitor management system is to speak to one of the experts at ID Edge. You can spend hundreds of hours researching this topic and still make errors when it comes to your implementation. ID Edge has three decades of experience implementing visitor management solutions for our customers, and we can help you find the best solution quickly and efficiently.
Get in touch! Simply fill out the Contact Form with your questions, or give us a call at (800) 798-3343!