The coronavirus (COVID-19) is throwing up all sorts of challenges for businesses – not least in relation to controlling access to buildings and sites. AEOS access control gives you great flexibility to set up special measures when people are working from home. But it’s also important to plan ahead for when all (or some of) your people are allowed to begin working from your sites again.
One particular AEOS feature to be aware of is the auto block function. This feature is triggered when someone hasn’t gained access for the number of days or weeks that you specify. It acts as a back-up if, for example, an employee has left the business but, for some reason, their authorisations haven’t been revoked.
If many of your people are working from home for long periods due to coronavirus measures, it’s a good idea to check and adjust your auto block settings. Then you can avoid the inconvenience and disruption of their access being blocked when they return.
There are two ways to do this.
1. Turn off auto block for people individually
You can do this via the AEOS dashboard interface (instructions are in section 3.12 of the AEOS user manual). Or you can do it via the AEOS maintenance interface (instructions are in section 4.1.10 of the AEOS user manual).
2. Increase your auto block period for everyone
This is also done via the AEOS maintenance interface (instructions are in section 5.1.6 of the AEOS user manual).
Staggered access for your teams
You may reach a point where you decide to allow some, but not all, of your teams or people to begin working from your sites again. Or you may need to allow access for deep-clean teams while your employees are working at home. For this, the AEOS Security Levels function is incredibly useful.
AEOS Security Levels lets you define scenarios with different authorisation needs in advance. It’s invaluable during emergency situations because you can switch to the right scenario, and so change all your access control settings, in a couple of seconds.
Set non-emergency scenarios
This function is also very useful, however, if you want to create non-emergency scenarios that are outside the norm. For example, a weekend open day once or twice a year or, in this case, teams returning from homeworking in a staggered fashion.
You just need to create a scenario for each phase of people returning to work. So, phase 1 might be only the deep-clean team have access. Phase 2 might be only directors and senior managers have access. Phase 3 might be only the IT team, plus directors and senior managers have access. And phase 4 might be back to your usual access control settings. You have the flexibility to create whatever scenarios and authorisations work best for you.
To find out more about AEOS auto block, AEOS Security Levels or the many other AEOS features that can help you at this time, please get in touch.
