How Security Measures Create a Flexible Work Environment
Access control innovation is helping businesses put employees first
- By Mark Duato
- February 01, 2019
As the job market grows increasingly competitive for top talent,
and as new tech allows more freedom and flexibility for
employees, many businesses have implemented highly flexible
work hours and additional remote worker benefits to stay
competitive in the market.
As a result of this trend, flexible office spaces are being created and
refined. A well-designed space may allow employees to come and go
repeatedly throughout a 24-hour business day and supports collaboration,
team building and a new-found freedom for employees to
move freely around the office during preferred working hours.
Changing Footprint
In recent years, the number of employees working in an office space
continues to decrease, and with that, so is the average square footage
for office space allotted per employee. Since 2010, the square footage
allocated per employee has decreased nearly 30 percent from 225 to
151 square feet. Business enterprises are rethinking how office spaces
are arranged and administered.
The rising costs of commercial real estate, or more specifically, the
costs to a business enterprise occupying space continue to scale rapidly,
particularly in major urban market areas—literally, every square
foot makes a difference. As a result, business enterprises are often
modifying the footprint of their offices and look for creative ways of
assigning and sharing space wherever possible with minimal or no
interruption to the business objectives.
Employees, therefore, may not necessarily be assigned to a specific
area or desk, but rather, have the flexibility to securely “choose” their
workspace—an office, a desk, maybe even a locker to safely store personal
belongings. Flexible solutions such as these help businesses
capitalize on space efficiencies and maximize the return on investment
for space.
Security Upgrades
With these benefits also come security risks. It’s imperative for businesses
to understand that flexible work hours and offices are going to
change the flow of employee traffic throughout an office environment.
It’s also important for businesses to manage traffic flow and to hold
employees accountable for their whereabouts throughout the facility
during the workday.
With that in mind, employers are leveraging new and unique
access control solutions to ensure that office space is both secure and
flexible, fostering collaboration and productivity without compromising on safety and security.
Specialized access control solutions such
as those provided by ASSA ABLOY and its
partners address these flexible employment
requirements by allowing employers to easily
implement secure identity credential cards,
or key cards, for each employee, or even to
leverage secure credentials which may
already be in use across the business enterprise.
Furthermore, the advent of secure
mobile credentials, similar to those which
you may see and use at a hotel, can enable
employees to easily reserve office, desk or
locker spaces to gain secure access ondemand
with virtually no lag time.
Credential information and access privileges
can be provisioned quickly and conveniently
as new employees are “on-boarded”
or simply as needed “on-demand.”
When an employee leaves for the day, week
or permanently, so too do their access
rights to offices, desks and lockers.
For example, in applications where an
employee needs to reserve a specific office on
a specific day, the employee can request access
through an easy-to-use application, a selfserve
kiosk or through security personnel to
use their key card or secure mobile identity
via their phone to gain access to the room for
the day, or that week. Once an employee
reserves the office, their credential can be
used with the wireless access control lock on
the door to conveniently open the office during
authorized time windows, meaning the
employee is free to come and go throughout
the day during those authorized windows,
and know the office is secure for them only.
Often businesses will provide employees
with a personal locker, or they may wish to
assign those lockers on demand. Again, in
these cases, a wireless access control cabinet
lock may be implemented to enable secure
access to the assigned locker, often on a firstcome-
first-served basis.
Another common application might be the
need to easily provision and de-provision
individual desk usage instead of an entire
office. In these cases, employers can implement
secure wireless or hardwired access control
readers at the available desks. Once verified,
the assigned user will be authorized to
use the electrical power and/or the phone
system by example. Not only does this help
employers securely control access privileges, it
may also help the business entity reduce the
associated energy costs for each workspace
In many cases, the same security measures
used on offices and desks can also be
implemented for shared conference and
meeting areas throughout the facility. In
these spaces, managers have the added benefit
of being able to recall meeting attendance
for each individual employee using
their secure credentials.
Employer and Employee-Focused Solutions
Progressive employers recognize the need
for flexible and remote work hours, along
with a need to manage hard and soft costs
per employee as it relates to the workspace.
Companies can affordably and efficiently
implement access control solutions that
help protect both the safety and security of
the employee and the business enterprise’s
assets. ASSA ABLOY supports this by
advancing innovative solutions and collaborative
partnerships, designed to complement
both the business enterprise and the
employee objectives.
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2019 issue of Campus Security Today.