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There is a plethora of reasons why access control systems are useful (and, increasingly, essential) for businesses. This article will outline how access control systems can benefit one specific department of businesses: human resources.
To put it simply, access control systems help protect businesses by determining who can and cannot have access to the business—or to specific resources within that business. This is accomplished with the use of company access cards (and other technologies provided by proximity card suppliers) that monitor—and, if necessary, restrict—users based on their clearance level. In this way, access control systems provide business-wide security by establishing various levels of security throughout the business.
Human resources is a common department within most successful business and operates as the central hub for employee relations. When someone gets hired at a company, the new employee will be in direct contact with human resources to go through orientation, payroll requirements, company rules and regulations, and general onboarding procedures. Human resources is a core component of every business as it works directly with every employee in the organization (yes, even the CEO). Since this department is so essential to businesses, it is important to keep it safe and protected. The following are just a few examples of the many ways access control systems can benefit and secure a business’s human resources department.
Human resources handles all onboarding of new employees, which means that it needs to have an access control system that allows it to grant new employees access to the business by assigning them a unique company access card. In particular, once a human resources representative for a specific business (take, for example, a hospital) hires an employee, the representative must ensure that they have the correct job title (e.g., “IT Specialist”) associated with that employee in their system. Once that employee is assigned the correct job title, this information will be used by the access control system to assign a clearance level to the new employee based on their job title. This clearance level will be reflected in the employee’s building access card, which will allow the employee access to certain parts of the business (e.g., the main business, the IT offices, etc.) but restrict access to others (e.g., the medicine cabinets, the MRI room, etc.). Ideally, an access control system will be updated so that each position (or job title) within the organization has a pre-determined set of access/denial rights—a clearance level—that will automatically go into effect once an employee is entered into the system by human resources.
Conversely, when an employee is terminated, human resources will go through an offboarding process where that employee will be deleted from the access control system. Once this happens, the building access card given to the employee will no longer be active; as such, someone that previously worked within that organization will have zero access.
Employees tend to take their anger out on human resources when they find out that they have been fired or that their benefits aren’t what they expected. Sometimes, this anger can even turn into violent acts. Therefore, the human resources department itself should be behind a secure door that requires company access cards to enter so that the employees working in the human resources department can feel protected. In this way, access control systems will help human resources employees feel safer at work.
Access control systems are also created to protect an organization’s database(s). Human resources has access to all employee information (including social security numbers, pay rates, employment statuses, addresses, and more). All of this information is sensitive and needs to be protected. Proximity card suppliers offer products and solutions to protect this information through the use of both physical and logical access control systems.
In the case of physical access control systems, proximity card suppliers offer company access cards that can be used to secure the physical servers on which sensitive employee information is stored. To put it simply, human resources wants to avoid just anyone walking in and changing an employee’s pay rate or stealing an employee’s identity. This physical access control will ensure that the office space can only be accessed by the few human resources employees that can view such information. As an extra layer of security, logical access control systems can be used to ensure that both a password and a company access card are needed to view sensitive employee information.
Human resources also often bears a huge responsibility in legal cases involving employees. When company inventory goes missing, for example, human resources can check the access control records to see which building access card was last used in that facility to help identify the culprit. This can also be used to track an employee’s actions at work (for example, are they going into their office every day, or just spending all of their time in the cafeteria?). This can give human resources a detailed analysis of where and when employees are accomplishing their work tasks.
As stated above, human resources is directly responsible for payroll within an organization. That means that it needs to give the company’s employees access to a timeclock system. Access control systems integrate with timeclocks rather smoothly by using building access cards to clock an employee in and out of work every day. Proximity card suppliers can provide multiple timeclock machines for a range of departments so that all an employee needs to do is swipe/scan their card to clock-in. This makes clocking -in and -out incredibly convenient. Additionally, all of an employee’s timeclock information will be organized in a system that is run and managed by human resources.
Human resources is an integral part of any organization and, as such, businesses need to find ways to increase productivity and security within the department. Access control systems can help human resources through protecting employee and company information, ensuring employee accountability, facilitating payroll, and more. Logical and physical access control systems use company access cards provided by a proximity card supplier that are given to each employee with different levels of access to secure the security of the organization as a whole. Human resources uses these systems every day for the organization’s general benefit.
