Five questions to ask to ensure the wellbeing of everyone on your school grounds
Written by Emma Morgan, Industry Marketing Manager at FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia.
Across the media, I often see articles that talk to how important student and staff wellbeing is to school leaders. Whether it be mental health or physical health, there is no doubt that COVID has brought this concern to the forefront.
Visitor management at schools is not a new thing. But it is more important than ever for school leaders to ensure safeguards are in place to manage visitors and volunteers when they are onsite. Following best practice in this area will help alleviate concern about physical wellbeing.
Let’s start with a simple exercise.
Have a think about how many people are visiting your school each day. Is it 10, 50, 100? Once you have a number in mind ask yourself:
- How do you communicate to visitors where they have to go and what they need to do upon arrival? Do you have a consistent approach or is it up to the person extending the invitation?
- What happens if a visitor does not enter through the main entrance? Are you sure they are still signing-in?
- How do you manage the induction of the visitor on to your site? Do they know what to do if there is a lockdown or an evacuation?
- What items do a visitor encounter when they sign-in? Is there a way to make the process contactless?
- Where and how do you record working with children check (WWC) (or equivalent) information? How do you know the information the visitor is supplying is correct?
If your existing visitor management solution/process does not provide an answer to all these questions, you may be placing the wellbeing of people on your grounds at risk.
There are simple steps schools can take to ensure that you are managing visitors in a secure way:
- Have a communication template or script available to staff. This will ensure consistent communication to visitors on what they are required to do ahead of and on arrival
- Put in place visitor sign-in capabilities at each school entry point to curb the risk of visitors slipping through the cracks (don’t expect everyone to attend one location to sign-in)
- Make visitor induction a step of your sign-in process. This will guarantee all visitors know what to do in an emergency
- Deploy a visitor management solution that allows visitors to complete their check-in (and out) on their own device
- Implement a visitor management solution that can verify the status of WWC (or equivalent) information as part of the check-in process
What can FUJIFILM Business Innovation do to help?
Upstream, a FUJIFILM Business Innovation company, has recently launched a next generation visitor management and compliance solution that can help you to address the challenges highlighted above, by validating visitor credentials, providing induction material and much more.
To find out more speak to your account manager, call us on 13 14 12 or visit https://upstream.com.au/business-processes/visitor-sign-in-and-contractor-compliance/.