Visitor badges

Need Awesome Visitor Badges? This is your ultimate guide

By Maddy GlynnDigital Marketing Specialist
Published on April 29, 2019

Visitor badges are a must for every workplace.

For many companies, as they grow, the ever-increasing volume of staff, visitor and contractors can create a raft of challenges. To ensure a safe environment for everyone on your site, it's important to be able to quickly identify who should and should not be on your site. Visitor badges and policies for their use are an essential strategy to manage these challenges. They help to identify who the visitors are within a workplace and provide vital information about the visitor. Much of which help your company stay safe, compliant and drastically speed up your workflows. 

The following is a complete guide to why you need visitor badges and what your visitor badges need to include.  

What are visitor badges?

The use of badges has long been standard within many workplaces, healthcare facilities and schools to easily and quickly identify visitors. Employees are often required to wear badges in workplaces that require a high level of security, such as government facilities,

In addition to these benefits, the check-in process for visitors to receive their badge is an opportune time to gather critical information about visitors before they enter your site.

Employee badges tend to stay valid, but visitor badges will have a specific amount of time they'll be valid for which is generally controlled by an action. More often than not, when the visitor checking out.

printed badges for visitors

The benefits of visitor badges to your workplace

Visitor badges provide a lot of benefits to workplaces which are often overlooked and here's a few of them:

1. Improving security in the workplace

More often than not workplaces have multiple entry points with each of these points catering to different types of visitors - deliveries, employees, general visitors and so on. Becoming more apparent when you consider companies spread out over large campuses, such as healthcare facilities, universities and government facilities. As the amount of entry points increases the probability that a person can enter and wander around without clearance increases. 

With visitor badges, these chances are drastically decreased by requiring all visitors to wear a badge. As a result, you will know who's who. Even more so, if you require them to include a photo of themselves. It also helps to instantly identify who's meant to be on-site, as those who aren't won't have a badge. 

Other precautions can be taken to further improve the security of your workplace. You can include validity dates and a QR code. The QR code is used through a visitor management system's dashboard to give you a better overview.

2. Making a good first impression for visitors

You as a company want to create a good first impression for the people coming into your workplace. Which, in most cases, starts at the check-in process. Automatically printing out visitor badges after check-in is a great way to uphold a great, modern company image. You can do this through a visitor management system. 

It will also tighten your company's branding by including your logo on the badge and other key details. 

3. Using them as reference tools

From time to time your visitors will get lost. 

Workplaces can be large with multiple buildings and division. Look at hospitals which more resemble campuses rather than hospitals. Making it easy for visitors to end up in the wrong places. 

A visitor badge can feature information like who they're seeing and what division that person is in. Making it easy to steer the visitor in the right direction and provide an amazing experience for everyone who enters your site.

4. And the obvious one - identification

Apart from quickly identifying people in the workplace, it can also help identify people in other scenarios. 

For example, consider that your workplace is hosting an event. More than likely, you've gotten them to sign in on an iPad to capture their email and have already pre-printed a badge. This badge serves as a networking tool. People often refer to them to introduce themselves and what they do. Apart from a business card, the visitor badge is the most important tool at an event. 

Southstart visitor badges

The benefits of visitor badges to the workplace are huge. Not only for the company itself, but also for the people visiting your sites. 

Critical information all visitor badges should have

It can be hard to develop a badge design when you don't have a reference to work from. Luckily, we have years of experience working with companies of every size, from Australia to the United States. To get started, here is the essential information to consider including on your design.

For a visitor badge to be effective, consider some specific information that needs to be featured (we've even got a great image of an example visitor badge):

  • Photo Identification 
  • Visitor name 
  • Visitor company 
  • Who the host is 
  • Visitor type 
  • Host company logo and name 
  • The check-in date and time 
example of qr code for added security

Making things easier with QR codes

QR codes can be used to speed up the process of checking out. Create a unique QR code for each visitor (which can be done automatically) so visitors can simply scan their QR code and leave the premises. This will then automatically update your visitor management system, notifying you that particular visitor has left. 

Design considerations for visitor badges

Different workplaces have different requirements and it's important to consider how these may impact your rollout of a visitor badge system and policy. For some businesses, it is impractical for their visitors to wear adhesive badges due to the nature of work conducted on the site or a need for specific PPE to be worn. In these scenarios, you may consider implementing non-adhesive badges that can be easily slipped into a lanyard.

printed badge in lanyard

Integrating badges with a visitor management system

The advancement of technology means there are better, more streamlined ways to prepare visitor badges than manually creating these at reception. Drastically improving speed and cost of their development. Which also allows you to include things like a QR code and visitor photo identification. You can do this through a visitor management system. This allows you to automate your visitor badge development and also give you access to a whole range of other features you didn't have before. 

You can prepare automated custom badges for your visitors with Honeywell Forge Visitor and Contractor Management. Find out more about our badge printing feature for Sine Core.

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