6 Ways of Headcount Management for Employees During an Emergency

To deal with any emergency cases, it should be crucial for your organization to implement procedures for workplace evacuations. Also, it is necessary to keep an account of all the employees after a successful evacuation. Headcount management allows organizations to track employees in such emergency evacuation cases effectively.

On this topic, discuss some of the most popular ways that your organization can use to keep a check on missing employees.

Paper roster

A paper roster serves as the most elementary form of headcount. Even while nostalgic, paper or manual spreadsheet is so error prone, it should not even be used for small-scale organizations. Additionally, for large corporations with hundreds of employees, this approach is impossible. The roster must be kept precisely up to date with the HR rosters.

To integrate By headcount management/emergency mustering, contact cloud-in-hand.com support to discuss integration with the building's access control system.

Electronic roster

Using Cloud-in-Hand stratus-io Time & Attendance, when an emergency happens the information about who’s on-site is immediately available This method included the following options:

• Sending current occupancy to the evacuation managers via email.

• Creating an occupancy roster for who’s present on a tablet.

• Immediately begin checking people in at the rally points (muster points)

Badge scanning

Security badge scanning on the facility entrance can be an improved version over traditional rosters. Security badges are easy to use when an organization has a robust network infrastructure. It allows evacuation captains to access the occupancy list instantly from tablet. When an emergency occurs, this type of system can enable evacuations heads with critical data of the employees in real-time.

Biometrics

When people are identified by their features like fingerprint, face, eye scan – this is called biometrics. Fingerprint technology is currently the most widely utilized biometric technology in the security industry.

Face recognition from video and iris recognition are two other biometrics that is becoming more widely utilized as their technology progress and becomes more capable. Some ask how these can be used during an emergency. While it’s functionally possible, These methods for check-in at muster points, currently are too slow for emergency checkin.

Long Range RFID

Rather than scanning employee badges manually, long-range Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) allows employees to scan automatically at a distance. The RFID tags operating in the 840–960 MHz frequency range (ISO/IEC 18000-6C compliant) are used in this system, known as UHF tags. Your organization can implement these tags in several ways:

• Place a sticker on the backside of the employee's current badge.

• Provide a new separate card with UHF tags.

• Incorporated into a badge holder.

Multiple RFID technologies are integrated into new access control badges.

Employees can be identified up to 25 feet away with these UHF tags. This system is excellent for validating when personnel exit through established doorways, accounting for them near an evacuation area and accurately recognizing when they leave a facility.

Cell phones and SMS based programs

Some headcount systems make use of mobile infrastructure to help with the evacuation. There are two systems for these solutions: app-based systems and SMS-based systems.

App-based solutions can use the phone's Geolocation to tell if an employee is outside of a risk zone, or they can make the user check-in manually. SMS systems transmit text messages to users as a kind of notice, and they may or may not have two-way communication, allowing employees to indicate if they are safe or need assistance.

In the summary

Remember, your organization's employees can behave unexpectedly in situations of emergencies. However, having a headcount management program implemented following an emergency evacuation plan can ensure the safety of your employees.