Each month that goes by we get questions from existing and new customers around the ability for an employee to sign in and sign out their presence on site easily to assist with the evacuation process. Some of the initial issues raised with employees signing in and signing out their presence on site for evacuation management is the stigma behind management or salaried staff actually signing in and signing out each day. Some people believe this to be a form of time and attendance that is not normally completed by salaried staff.
When we talk about evacuation management of a building we need to know who every person is that is in the building to successfully complete an evacuation drill. This should include employee, visitors, contractors and any other person in the building no matter the reason for the visit.
I found this great PDF with information to assist you build an emergency plan. The last few pages of the PDF includes an emergency plan checklist
If we wish to conduct evacuation drills we really should capture every person inside a building including employees, visitors, contractors and any other person that is on-site.
This brings about the question how do we capture the employees presence on site easily without making the process difficult for the employees. This is where technology is now available to assist make the process of knowing who every person in your building is when conducting an evacuation drill.
Over the past 10 years one of those technologies that is going to revolutionize the way we track people in and out of buildings is with near field communication. The technology exists today to give an employee an access control card that they can hold in their pocket or wallet and when the employee walks through a door the card can be read automatically noting the presence of the employee on and off site for evacuation purposes. One of the issues that we have encountered over the past few years is getting employees to make the physical transaction by signing in and signing out using a number of methods that are available.
Recent inquiries for this style of technology includes a ship builder in Australia who runs a monthly evacuation drill that currently takes several hours each month to complete with as many as 2000 employees, a government department that has hundreds of employees in the building looking for immediate evacuation reporting information. Next week we will look deeper into the cost of running manual evacuation drills.
Book in for a demonstration of the visitor management software with the link below and see how you can improve your evacuation process.