What is visitor management? A guide for workplaces

Intro to visitor management

With so many people accessing the workplace daily, how do you keep track of everyone that comes and goes? How do you know who is on-site at anytime? How do you quickly access time and attendance insights for specific people or know when someone important shows up? These are just some of the questions that visitor management can answer. If you’re just starting your research about visitor management and want to learn more, this guide walks you through everything you need to know.

What is visitor management?

Visitor management helps a workplace keep track of the people that visit. This includes both new visitors and regular visitors such as workers. This is done by having visitors check in on arrival and check out when leaving and involves technology to automate the process. The data, which is stored in a database for easy referencing and reporting, can be used for tracking time and attendance, increasing security of a site, managing the number of people on site, and other workplace insights.

check in screen

Why visitor management is important?

An accurate understanding of who is accessing the workplace goes a long way to keeping the workplace safe and secure. From workers to new visitors, to cleaners, to maintenance people, a typical workplace might have various people attend during any 24 hour period. With visitor management a workplace can:

  • Improve security by identifying everyone that walks through the door.
  • More accurately track the time and attendance of workers.
  • Ensure new visitors meet certain requirements for entry.
  • Minimise the spread of a virus by recording the body temperature of those entering.
  • Perform better contact tracing by identifying people that might have been in contact with an infected person.
  • Set up alarms to be notified when a new visitor shows up.
  • Reduce front office costs by automating the check-in process.
  • See who is currently on-site.
  • Better manage overcrowding.
  • Verify attendance of external contractors such as cleaners.
  • Make data-driven decisions based on the volume of visits and attendance.

How visitor management is different to workforce management

Workforce management focuses more on the induction and approval process for contractors to work at a particular work site. Induction can require contractors to upload specific documents that certify they are compliant and capable of performing a job. This makes entry to a worksite more seamless as the contractor has been pre-approved to access and begin work or training.

Some workforce management systems do integrate with visitor management systems to provide a more comprehensive solution. Ask about our integration with Rapid Global to learn more.

Digital check-in versus paper check-in

While some workplaces still rely on pen and paper to sign in visitors, the safer, faster and more accurate option is provide a digital check-in process that leverages facial recognition. The benefits are:

Touch-free for a safer check-in

With a better awareness of how viruses spread following the pandemic, people are less likely to want to touch shared surfaces. This includes pen and paper but also touch-based screens. That’s why the best visitor management solutions are touchless.

Seamless entry

The best visitor management solutions make the check in process quick and seamless. Regular visitors such as workers shouldn’t have to scan anything or fill out any forms. This is the benefit of facial recognition. See how this works.

Easy access to insights

Paper logs have a tendency to pile up or get lost altogether. It’s also difficult and time consuming to sift through all the information to find valuable insights.

With digital check ins, all information is stored securely online for easy access. With just a few clicks you can see a list of check ins, view monthly attendance for a specific individual, or see a breakdown of different groups of people.

More accurate information

Typos, spelling mistakes and bad handwriting are all possible with paper check-ins and while mistakes can be made on digital forms, the benefit of using facial recognition is that a person's image is linked with their information.

Popular visitor management features

These are just some of the features you want to look out for when evaluating a visitor management solution.

Easy setup

Visitor management solutions should be simple to set up. For example, at Nirovision we allow you to turn any iPad into a touchless check in kiosk.

Phone and web app

Apps allow a workplace to access insights remotely, receive alarm notifications and more.

Facial recognition

This allows seamless and accurate check in of frequent visitors such as staff but also easy on-boarding and verification of new visitors.

Dynamic QR codes

These are unique QR codes that change for every person. They can be displayed when someone is not recognised, allowing for easy on-boarding and check in of new visitors.

Temperature screening

This feature allows a workplace to capture baseline temperatures and be alerted for anomalies.

Alarms and notifications

Set up alerts for failed check-ins, for particular identities and labels.

Labels

The ability to apply labels to specific identities allows a workplace to easily identify who people are.

Search

The ability to view check-in lists by day and time along with time and attendance insights.

Metadata

This is information that can be applied to identities within a database to provide more context around who people are.

How private is visitor management?

Visitor management databases are similar to any customer relationship management (CRM) system. They are private and password protected. Obviously there is some onus on the workplace to ensure only those authorised can access and passwords are not shared.

From a legal perspective, there are some laws around collecting biometric information.  

Generally, an organisation or agency may only scan and use a person’s biometric information for the purposes of identifying the individual, or as part of an automated biometric verification system, if either:


  • the law authorises or require them to collect it; or
  • it is necessary to prevent a serious threat to the life, health or safety of any individual; or
  • the organisation has obtained the individual's consent. That consent may be express or implied (eg. clicking on the 'I agree' button on a website privacy statement).

Check out this guide to learn more about Australian privacy laws and facial recognition.

How do you implement visitor management?

To start tracking everyone who enters the workplace you will need to get setup with a check in kiosk at one or more entrances. This needn’t be complex. With Nirovision, you can turn any iPad into a touchless check in kiosk. See the video below.


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