After two years of many companies working from home, we’re getting to a point where offices have reopened their doors—or will be soon. Whether your workforce is returning all the time or in a hybrid schedule, whatever “back to the office” looks like for you, your security system and user base will look different, too. And things will be much busier than they were before the pandemic.
Aaron Newark
Sr. Technical Specialist
With more system use, it’s always a good idea to look ahead and plan how it’ll affect your day-to-day operations. While this isn’t an exhaustive list—your operational needs, auditing and compliance, and business needs are specific to your company—let’s look at some of the key things that will universally impact your team as they step back in the building.
Cardholders will need badges
It’s safe to say many of your people put their badge in their wallet, laptop bag, purse or pocket two-plus years ago and haven’t seen it since. So many of those will need to be replaced. You’ll also need to provide new badges to employees who joined your company as fully work-from-home and now need access to your buildings. That increase in both replacement and new badges means you should expect run rates for badge printing to be higher than before the shutdown.
Businesses have remodeled during the office closure
Some companies used the closure as a time to remodel and adjust their layouts. Those changes often include new construction, plexiglass at the front desk, seating moved further apart and new ways of using certain spaces. But don’t forget: This could mean camera angles have changed, too, which can impact recording retention and field of view. It’s a good time to verify that at least critical cameras are adjusted correctly and that there’s sufficient storage for any new activity.
More cardholders in office means more activity
With reduced office use over the past couple of years, operations centers also saw fewer alarms and events—and with less to monitor, their staff numbers could have been reduced accordingly. As more cardholders move back into and around buildings, alarms and event counts will increase, too, requiring more monitoring. Smaller systems that don’t have active monitoring also will need to be ready for an increase in incidents that will need to be reviewed after they happen. And either way, users will need to be ready to follow processes that haven’t been used as often since early 2020, so it might be a good time to review your security policies and procedures both with your team and to make sure they still meet your business needs.
Increased use means finding issues
Think about it like pulling a car out of storage after it hasn’t been driven for a while. It’s going to have issues. Security systems are no different. If one of your card readers stops working, you might not know about it until someone comes back to the office and tries to use it. And that’s true for all the hardware in your system. Now is a good time to run a system audit of all your spaces, or at the very least, the critical ones.
Get ready for guests to arrive
With employees back in the office, they’ll likely also return to meeting face-to-face with people from outside your company. Make sure your visitor system is working properly and that there are enough visitor badges on hand, no matter how you badge and check-in guests. It’s important for any-size company to audit its visitor-badge inventory to see how much of your existing stock might have been misplaced since they were last used.
Policies and procedures may have changed
Not just internally, but outside your organization, as well. Laws and compliance requirements that apply to your business may have changed over the past couple of years. And internally, you probably put some new ones in place to adjust to remote work. Both of these things could impact your systems operations and require a configuration review. Badge-use policies, alerting options, and data brought into and out of the system should all be reviewed for compliance.
While things might never go back to pre-2020, we’re definitely seeing offices reopen and start to find a new normal. Right now is the time to audit your key areas, hardware, system settings, policies and procedures to make that reopening as smooth as possible. Be ready, plan ahead as much as you can and track any impacts when you encounter them. Because opening your offices is more than just people coming back, and the right planning can help you avoid any major impacts.
