Should You Consider Badge-Out?
According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 75% of U.S. workers with remote-capable jobs now work remotely at least some of the time, compared to just 6.5% of workers who worked primarily from home before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hybrid work is the baseline for many organizations. Employees who used to badge in at 9 AM and leave the office at 5 PM, Monday through Friday, are now coming and going at more random times.
For building security staff, it’s suddenly more challenging to know precisely who is in a building at any given time. For safety managers, an ever-changing workforce makes it difficult to quickly and accurately account for all personnel in the event of an emergency evacuation. If this sounds like your organization, it may be time to consider adding employee badge-out as a standard procedure, especially if your current access control protocol only requires badge-in.
Why is Badge-Out Important?
When your workforce arrives and leaves at roughly the same time, knowing who is in the facility is straightforward. If you cannot find someone during a fire drill, it might be easy to locate them by asking those who sit near their cubicle, office, or work area. But with an unpredictable number of people working on-site, determining who is truly missing and who is working remotely suddenly requires a bit more guesswork.
Safety-critical or hazardous facilities, like refineries or chemical plants, often require badge-out or hard anti-passback to ensure an accurate accounting of personnel in the event of an emergency evacuation. Real-time occupancy monitoring allows security personnel to quickly tally who was actually in the facility during the evacuation. This method provides more confidence when mustering people at an evacuation point. Safety or security personnel can easily create a list of all badge holders who have badged into the facility, and those who have badged out are filtered out of the roster.
Requiring badge-out means first responders will have a readily available, accurate list of people who may be in the building during an emergency, allowing them to spend less time guessing and more time saving lives.
Without badge-out, here is no way to know who has left your facility and who is still inside.
Can you track your true occupancy without badge-out? Not Really…
Without badge-out, physical access control logs will show people who have been badged in for days or even months. Obviously, if the system says an employee badged in a week ago but didn’t leave, you can be pretty sure they aren’t in the building. But in an emergency, “pretty sure” isn’t good enough. Having accurate roster data is critical to make sure everyone is safe and accounted for.
The problem goes deeper than just missing exit data. Physical access anomalies, such as off-hours entry or tailgating, often go unnoticed until something like a failed evacuation drill forces the issue. Badge-out can help close gaps in physical access control records. The key is to implement a reliable system before disaster reveals those gaps.
What happens without badge-out? In summary,
- No accurate real-time occupancy count
- Evacuation captains or first responders get an inaccurate list of “missing” persons during evacuations
- No audit trail for timekeeping and overtime compliance
- Tailgating or piggybacking goes undetected
A Real Life Situation
Personally, I’ve worked in a location that required badge-out. My company had about 100 employees working on three always-locked floors in a small multi-tenant office building in lower Manhattan. Some of us worked unconventional hours, and many of us floated from floor to floor during the workday. Only the main floor had a receptionist who could let visitors in. Piggybacking was not permitted, nor was giving your ID badge to someone else. If you failed to badge out of a floor, the system locked you out of the remaining floors until your status was manually reset on the main reception floor. This assured us that only people with valid badges got into any area.
Badge-out also helped with overtime work audits. If the employee claimed on their timesheet to have worked until 7 PM, but their badge-out timestamp for that day showed 6 PM, this provided reasonable cause to investigate.
Having a badge-out requirement turned our physical security from a policy on paper into a daily habit, one that each employee reinforced every time they walked out the door.
Beyond Badging-Out
Adding readers to your existing access control system for employees to badge out is a great first step to knowing who is in the building and who is not. But to do it right, you want to make sure your existing access control system provides a good list of who is in your facility at all times. In many cases, you will find that your access control system is built mainly for just that – providing access to people – but it may not do a great job tracking exactly who is in the facility at any given time.
XPressEntry is a system designed to close the gap in mobile occupancy tracking. With handheld readers, the system can be used to:
- Track who is currently in a facility or zone
- Verify identities using existing badges, mobile credentials, or facial recognition
- Record entries and exits anywhere in a facility, even offline
- Account for all personnel quickly and accurately during fire drills and real emergencies
XPressEntry integrates with virtually any access control system, including LenelS2 OnGuard, Genetec Synergis, AMAG Symmetry, and more. As badges are presented to fixed readers at doorways and other access points, XPressEntry receives real-time updates of employee locations in the facility. These updates are instantly pushed out to XPressEntry handhelds.
With XPressEntry, security personnel have fewer missing pieces in the emergency mustering puzzle during an evacuation — there’s no need to print a list of everyone in the facility, as it’s available on any XPressEntry handheld device.
Had XPressEntry existed back at my old company in Manhattan, I’m sure our VP of Operations would have replaced the emergency headcount clipboard right away.
If you want to take badge-out to the next level, contact Telaeris to learn more about XPressEntry!
This blog was originally published on Sep 8th, 2020, and has been updated to improve accuracy and relevance. Last updated: March 2026