An after-hours visitor who isn’t tracked in real-time is a person your emergency team cannot find. In Australia, the WHS Act 2011 requires PCBUs to ensure the health and safety of all visitors; in the US, OSHA mandates similar protections. If your site occupancy data is trapped in a physical book or a single desk tablet, you cannot meet these legal obligations during an evacuation.
Your duty of care does not pause when the reception desk is empty
In our work with Australian and US organisations, we see that legal liability hinges on the ability to account for everyone on site. Australian PCBUs under the WHS Act 2011 and US employers under OSHA must maintain a reliable method to manage site occupancy, regardless of the hour or staffing levels.
Physical logs create a dangerous information vacuum
Most organisations rely on a manual process that records arrivals but fails to track departures. This creates a flawed report that takes hours to compile, leaving wardens guessing who is still inside the building during a crisis.
- Expecting a warden to retrieve a physical book or tablet from a reception desk while fleeing a building.
- Using paper logs that record who arrived but provide no way to verify who actually left.
- Managing multi-tenant lobbies with hundreds of visitors using manual sheets that cannot be aggregated in real-time.
- Maintaining reports that take hours to produce when seconds matter for first responders.
Live site occupancy transforms evacuation from guesswork to verification
A cloud-based visitor management system ensures that site data is accessible from any authorised device, even if the main reception area is inaccessible. This allows for immediate muster point verification and precise emergency reporting.
- Deploy self sign-in kiosks in lobbies to ensure all after-hours visitors are captured without requiring staff presence.
- Utilise a digital visitor management platform that syncs data in real time to the cloud for remote access.
- Provide fire wardens with an evacuation app to access the real-time evacuation report instantly on their own devices.
- Enable administrative overrides to sign out absent personnel, ensuring the live site occupancy report remains accurate.
Time and People: Visitor Management That Works When It Has To
For over 12 years, we have helped organisations across Australia and the United States replace flawed manual processes with cloud-connected visitor management. We’ve found that removing the need to “pick up a book” during a fire saves lives by putting the real-time evacuation report directly into the hands of the people who need it. We focus on the infrastructure that protects your people.
Content prepared by Time and People — visitor and contractor management across Australia and the United States.