Create sign-out policies that work for your workplace

Knowing who arrives and having easy access to their visitor details are key parts of visitor management—but what about the sign-out process? This feature often gets overlooked, but can be truly powerful when you put it to work in your office.

Ready to get started with sign-out policies in your office? Here’s how:

Consider why you might use sign-out

Emergency preparedness
In the case of an emergency or evacuation, your team needs to account for everyone—including visitors. But without sign-out times, it’s difficult to know who has left and who is still in the building. Use sign-out to ensure you know which visitors are still onsite.

Time tracking for visitors
Some visitor policies require that you track how long guests are onsite or that all guests leave my a certain time of day. By recording sign-out times, it’s easy to track who exits when and attend to visitors who are over their time limit.

Better recordkeeping
When you require guests to sign out, you simply have a more accurate record of their visit. You know exactly when they entered, who they visited, and when they left. Use this data to find out which employees host visitors the longest, or track visit length by visitor type.

Regulatory compliance
Regulatory bodies often require that you keep visitor logs of who’s onsite and when—so sign-out can be a key part of staying compliant. You can even build a full visitor exit protocol around sign-out, depending on your specific compliance needs. More on that below!

Get to know the features

Envoy Visitors offers several ways to record sign-out times. You can create your policy around one feature, or use a combination to make sure your bases are covered.

Dashboard sign-out
You can sign out visitors from the dashboard. To do so, just click “sign out” on their visitor entry. Or, select multiple entries to easily sign out a group of visitors at once.

Self sign-out
This feature appears as a button on your iPad welcome screen. Guests tap to sign out, select their name, and Envoy Visitors records their sign-out time. Enable self sign-out.

Employee sign-out
Any employee can sign out their own visitors from the Envoy Passport app. Bonus! Assistants can sign out visitors on behalf of their executives.

Automatic sign-out
With this feature enabled, any visitor that has not signed out by 11:59pm will be automatically signed out. Use this as your sole sign-out method or as a backup with other methods. Enable automatic sign-out.

Create a visitor sign-out policy

There’s no one-size-fits-all option for visitor sign-out policies. It’s important that you create a policy that works for your workplace, meets your compliance needs, and supports your company values. With that in mind, here are a few examples:

Self sign-out policy
Although self sign-out is done by the visitor, most guests need to be prompted to do so. If your front desk is staffed, your team can remind visitors to sign out when they’re on their way out.

Employee escort policy
If you’d prefer that employees manage their own visitors, they can escort the visitor to the door, then use their Passport app to sign out their visitor before returning to their desk.

Robust and compliance-friendly policy
In stricter workplaces, employees often escort visitors to the lobby. Badge disposal helps ensure that unwanted visitors cannot obtain badges and enter unnoticed, so the front desk team can request and securely dispose of each visitor’s badge. Then, they can sign out each visitor from the dashboard.

We hope you’ve found this helpful! Stay tuned for more tips coming soon.