Our step-by-step guide to crafting the perfect visitor policy for your office

A visitor signing in at Headspace’s headquarters in Santa Monica, CA

An effective visitor policy is the string that pulls safety, security, and guest experience together with sparkling consistency. How can you find the right balance? Getting there isn’t quick or easy, but this five-step process will walk you through the basics to get you well on your way to writing a visitor policy that works for your company.

Step 1: Identify the risk to them and to you

Think about the different priorities you’d find between a factory and a law firm, or a university residence and a hospital: The environment, culture, and level of security needed are all over the spectrum.

The first thing you need to do is zoom in on your company’s particular needs:

• What safety and/or security risks will guests potentially be exposed to? For example, there might be machinery to account for, safety hazards that need to be managed, or individual privacy to be considered.
• What are the risks posed by outside guests? Risks can be mundane or business critical. For example, theft, data security, and threats to the safety of others are obvious concerns. However, you may also have more unique concerns, such as protecting sterile environments or vulnerable people, or stopping tech like cameras and smartphones at the front door.
• How significant is each of these risks, and how can they be mitigated?

Identifying risks, and how to manage each one, goes beyond the scope of a visitor policy and will likely take expert help as well as close contact with your facilities manager.

So why start here? You need to be clear about the restrictions and behaviors that will help you make the rest of your decisions.

Step 2: Identify your guests

There are contractors and vendors, customers, salespeople, volunteers, job candidates, family, friends, and even members of the public you might need to account for. Keep things as simple as possible by organizing your groups into just a few categories.

• What different types of guests does your company have?
• Figure out what access each group needs to building facilities. What’s their reason for being there?
• How does purpose impact the check-in process? For example, interns may need employee-level access, while clients will need to connect with their hosts as quickly as possible.
• Also consider the risks you identified earlier. Are particular groups of people exposed to, or responsible for, specific types of risks? How will that change your guest management process? Do you require security checks?
• How will each type of visitor be identified? Some places use color-coded badges, t-shirts, or hats. Other environments might require photo ID.
• What about guests during non-business hours? Some circumstances might have people on site before or after standard hours, such as service providers or people attending special events.

Step 3: Managing the check-in process

From NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) to name tags and notifications to hosts, making sure guests are checked in appropriately isn’t as easy as people often think. It takes careful planning to make sure the process will run quickly and smoothly, without a lot of hassle.

• How can you make sure those requirements are met and, just as importantly, that someone can’t wander in and skip check-in entirely? This is particularly critical if your visitor logs will be audited.
• What experience do you want your guests to have? Keep your process as simple and practical as possible, so people have a positive experience. You may want to consider using a visitor sign-in app like Envoy to streamline the check-in process for you and your guests. (Envoy automates badge-printing, host notifications and legal agreements, which allows you to spend your time on more important things.)

Step 4: Plan for enforcement

The counterbalance to putting the right procedures in place is making sure they’re actually followed.

• Who will be responsible for connecting with errant visitors, and what process should they take?
• What levels of enforcement are required? When is a situation easy to fix, and when should someone be removed from the premises?
• What should people do in an emergency? You should have other procedures in place so employees will know how to respond in an emergency situation. That plan should also account for people who may be visiting at the time.

Step 5: Writing a great visitor policy

All this leg work will help you understand the boundaries and expectations for your visitors. That’s the heavy lifting — the building blocks that set the foundation. Your visitor policy is the part most people will actually see. It needs to be relatively brief, reader friendly, and easily accessed.

Here’s how to think about your approach:

• What do guests need to know? Explain the expectations you have while they’re on premises and why they’re important.
• What do employees need to know? How can people be added to the guest list? What are their roles and responsibilities when it comes to visitors?
• Where will people find your policy? It’s common to put visitor policies online, or to make them available in reception. Procedures might be shared internally through something like an employee handbook.

Ultimately, your visitor policy needs to strike the right balance between protecting people and property with creating a practical and smile-worthy welcome for visitors. By clarifying expectations on both sides of the relationship, you’ll come up with a visitor policy that will keep everyone smiling.