Tech Talk: Visitor Access Control Tips

Does your company have a procedure to "sign-in" visitors who come to your facility?
Most companies do. Unfortunately, the visitor control procedures used by many companies have evolved over a period of years and are sometimes inconsistent and ineffective. It is recommended that the manager responsible for security periodically review the procedures its company uses to sign-in and control visitors. Here are some suggestions for effective visitor control procedures:

* A complete set of written visitor procedures should be prepared and distributed to all employees. These procedures can be included in an overall employee "security handbook" or distributed separately.
* All visitors to the facility should be required to sign-in when they come to the facility, and sign-out when they leave. For best security, the receptionist or security officer, not the visitor, should enter information into the visitor log.
* The visitor log should include the following information at a minimum: date, time visitor arrived/departed, visitor name, visitor company affiliation, name of company sponsor, and sponsor's telephone number.
* All visitors should be issued a visitor badge. Visitor badge should include date, visitor name, and name of company sponsor. You may wish to consider the use of a "self-expiring" type of visitor badge. These badges automatically expire after a certain number of hours, preventing the badge from being reused on another day.
* Non-escorted visitors should be issued a different type of identification badge than regular escorted visitors. Frequent visitors to the facility, such as janitors and service people, should be issued a permanent vendor identification badge. If your company uses photo identification badges for employees, a similar type of photo identification badge should be produced for permanent vendors.
* All visitors should be required to sign-out. At the end of each shift, the security officer or receptionist should run a tally of the visitor log to determine which visitors, if any, are still in the building.
* Visitors who have failed to sign-out should be identified. The employee who sponsored the visitor should be contacted and reminded that they are responsible for assuring that visitors follow the proper procedures.

The above is an excerpt from the article, "Security Tips from Silva Consultants" by Michael Silva. Click here to read the complete article.

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