Lessons Learned: Managing Facility Security in a COVID-Conscious World
The impact of COVID-19 is still being felt as we enter 2021. In addition to the devastating loss of life, the impact on organizations to protect workplaces that experience a high volume of physical traffic was significant. We learned many lessons as employers scrambled to adjust their protocols to protect visitors, employees, and their facilities during the pandemic.
Lessons on visitor management during COVID-19
The game changed for facility managers last year, thanks to COVID-19. New health and safety guidelines forced those tasked with building maintenance and support into new models to handle the crisis — and those models are likely to stick around through 2021 and possibly even permanently. The biggest lesson for facility managers during the pandemic was the need to improve visitor management. This includes:
Conveying policy changes to permitted building visitors.
Alerting tenants or employees when there is a new visitor in the building.
Screening and identifying visitors at entrances.
Streamlining how visitors are checked-in and released from the building.
Establishing permissions on where visitors may go.
Today, building managers are tasked with establishing visitor guidelines as much as they are with facilities management. It’s a brave new world for establishing and enforcing visitor guidelines that keep tenants safer. This could include:
In-building mask and personal protective equipment (PPE) usage.
Social distancing protocols and rules.
Hygiene standards for hand washing and disinfecting workspaces.
Ironically, while many of these rules are human-centric, it is technology that can help us enforce these standards. Facility managers will likely need to make some long-term changes to the technologies they use for this process. For example, facility managers should focus on solutions that offer remote monitoring, touchless features, and the ability to integrate video surveillance and access control.
How can technology help with COVID facility safety?
Today’s modern visitor management systems can take the sting out of the increasingly stressful processes surrounding disinfection management within our buildings. While many organizations decreased the number of on-site employees, facilities managers had to still up their game to protect visitors and the employees that remained. The goal, of course, is to proactively manage viral spread by meeting three goals:
Protect tenants and the facility from unauthorized visitors who may carry the virus.
Manage and control lobby and reception foot traffic.
Monitor the time guests spend in your building while tracking who they contact and where they go.
Technology can help enforce coronavirus screening measures in a variety of ways, including:
Send an email to expected visitors after an appointment is booked, outlining building protocols and expectations.
Provide a touchless kiosk to pre-scan visitors to assess for COVID-19 risk.
Monitor visitor movement within your facility through visitor badges with sensors that can trace and track activity.
Enable video surveillance to monitor for PPE and social distancing compliance.
Today, COVID-conscious building security requires that organizations increase their investment in technology tools to keep everyone safer. TRL Systems and Alcatraz teamed up to give facility managers smarter and more effective control systems to meet the goals of a post-COVID world.
COVID-conscious security with TRL Systems
In response to the pandemic, the team at TRL Systems teamed up with Alcatraz, a leader in secure touchless access control products. The goal was to improve the response to facility management during the COVID-19 crisis. Together, we offer a touchless, secure, physical access control platform that works with your existing access control system. We can integrate these systems to provide new AI-enabled tools like facial recognition, 3-D mask sensing, and more, to create a frictionless and highly effective way to protect your investment.
Today’s COVID-conscious building security requires that we increase our efforts to monitor and control the usage and traffic within facilities. If you’re looking for innovative, integrated solutions to protect your facility and the people who work and visit there, contact the team at TRL Systems. We can help you find the right solution for your unique needs.