Your employees within your business are vital to the day-to-day operations of your business, what is important to the business owner is ensuring you know where your staff are at any given time. This does not mean where they are within your premises or necessarily what they are doing but more importantly if they are present within the building or not.
Where are your employees?
Keeping track of your staff is an important part of your business operations, when a client calls your business and asks for a member of staff by name the last thing you want to end up doing is having the person on reception trying to track down your employee, yes your employee may be away from their desk, work station or environment but are the person on reception wasting valuable time by trying to locate someone who is not even in the premises? This would be quite embarrassing for the company, the receptionist and of course the business owner.
In the event of an emergency
Let’s now look into a very important scenario you should seriously take into consideration, at the moment we will imagine that as in the above paragraph you have no trace-ability within the workplace of the whereabouts of your staff, all you know is who has perhaps clocked in or called in sick that day. During the day you encounter an emergency situation such as a fire, the fire could be in your very own premises or perhaps you are sharing a building with multiple businesses within, the fire alarms are sounding and everyone must evacuate the building as speedily as possible. The building is now vacant and the fire officer is present, now your fire warden or marshal will need to report to the fire officer that all your employees are present at the assembly point as required in your emergency plan.
Now providing you have monitored which of your staff were present within the building at the time of the fire alarm sounding with staff attendance in/out boards then all should be fine. However, should your employees have not been monitored in the building then you may have a problem. The worst case scenario would be the fire brigade entering a burning building trying to find someone who you assumed were present and missing didn’t actually attend work that day, the fire brigade will be putting their lives at risk trying to find someone who is not even in the building.
Keeping track of your employees
For a number of reasons as described in the above paragraphs all businesses would benefit from staff attendance in/out boards within their reception area, to aid your receptionist identify the names of staff present or not are staff attendance boards with photographs of your staff added, this is excellent especially in the event of an emergency as should the scenario in the above paragraph actually happen and the fire brigade are actually seeking a member of staff that is present but missing then at least the fire brigade have a visual picture of what they look like.
