Elektronische Schlüsselschränke: Vorteile der Ausgabe von Arbeitsmitteln
Geschrieben von Tristan Becker am .
9 May 2022
Electronic Locker Cabinets: Benefits of issuing work equipment
9 May 2022
Nowadays, every employer is expected to provide work equipment to their employees. Be it a laptop, mobile or other equipment that they may need in order to accomplish their assigned tasks. Providing work equipment may incur cost to your company but in the long run, there do exist cost advantages resulting from increased efficiency, security, discipline, accountability etc, and even more so with electronic locker cabinets. To know more, read further.
BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) policy may seem the best deal for many corporations, allowing employees to decide how they want to work and companies to avoid investing in new computers or other equipment.
However, there are more downsides than upsides in the face of increased security risks, reduced workforce productivity and heightened complexity for management. Consequently, many organizations are now providing laptops, mobile phones, and other equipment to their employees. Though, providing employees with equipment does depend on company size but following points concern most companies so should be looked into before adopting an approach.
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1. Security
Employees bringing their own work equipment to workplace can be a major security concern for many companies. Since employees will be taking their, for e.g., laptops to their homes after work, there is a possibility that they share company data, often sensitive, with external people or competitors which can hugely impact company’s position in the market. And if this data turns out to be company’s customer data, it will hamper the company’s image and can even lead to legal troubles. Moreover, even if your employees are very trustworthy and you are sure that they will not indulge in any such activities, it is possible that they may bring viruses or malware to the workplace, may be because of installing or downloading some risky file or software, or just not using proper anti-virus software.
Whatever may be the reason, it is you and your company that will be at risk. Besides, in Europe, it is now compulsory for companies to protect customer data if they intend to deal with them (GDPR).
Issuing work equipment to your employees puts you in charge of what kind of laptops and operating systems will be used, which softwares are installed, and which could be installed, when and how the antivirus software should be upgraded and so on. All this helps in ensuring greater information security and prevents viruses, malware, data leaks or hacks.
2. Icompatible or inefficent equipment
Organizing more than a dozen keys requires a lot of lists, documents, guidelines, and communication effort. With so many different elements it is nearly impossible to keep them all up to date and to be sure that each employee knows their permissions regarding keys. In consequence, involuntarily overstepping rights is unavoidable. To reduce this, employees become overcautious when needing a key, increasing the administrative effect even more.
All of this can be avoided with an electronic key control system that gives employees physical access only to keys they have permission to. No ambiguity and no stress. The system can further be configured on how long a key can be removed for use and when it needs to be returned. Employees can add valuable information as a note on the system.
Organizing more than a dozen keys requires a lot of lists, documents, guidelines, and communication effort. With so many different elements it is nearly impossible to keep them all up to date and to be sure that each employee knows their permissions regarding keys. In consequence, involuntarily overstepping rights is unavoidable. To reduce this, employees become overcautious when needing a key, increasing the administrative effect even more.
All of this can be avoided with an electronic key control system that gives employees physical access only to keys they have permission to. No ambiguity and no stress. The system can further be configured on how long a key can be removed for use and when it needs to be returned. Employees can add valuable information as a note on the system.
However, there should be considered that not all employees will be able to own high performance equipment, which is usually known to be quite pricey. A possible outcome of this issue could be a reduced output.
There is also a probability that employees can sometimes come up with excuses that their work equipment is just not cooperative today. On other instances, their laptop may be of particularly decent quality, however it is not suitable for work like that of marketing or designing. All these scenarios ask for a decent quality work equipment, but it will also not make sense to allot everyone an expensive equipment just because some are not able to perform their work properly as it can lead to unnecessary costs for the company.
To provide the right equipment to everyone, a needs analysis should be conducted throughout the company. Every employee’s working condition and task should be considered and then accordingly procurement should be done. In this way every employee’s demand can be met and organizational efficiency can be maintained.
All of this can be avoided with an electronic key control system that gives employees physical access only to keys they have permission to. No ambiguity and no stress. The system can further be configured on how long a key can be removed for use and when it needs to be returned. Employees can add valuable information as a note on the system.
However, there should be considered that not all employees will be able to own high performance equipment, which is usually known to be quite pricey. A possible outcome of this issue could be a reduced output.
There is also a probability that employees can sometimes come up with excuses that their work equipment is just not cooperative today. On other instances, their laptop may be of particularly decent quality, however it is not suitable for work like that of marketing or designing. All these scenarios ask for a decent quality work equipment, but it will also not make sense to allot everyone an expensive equipment just because some are not able to perform their work properly as it can lead to unnecessary costs for the company.
To provide the right equipment to everyone, a needs analysis should be conducted throughout the company. Every employee’s working condition and task should be considered and then accordingly procurement should be done. In this way every employee’s demand can be met and organizational efficiency can be maintained.
In companies where BYOD policy is followed, it becomes difficult at times for employees to solve some technical problem, hardware or software related, as they just do not have the right hardware or software with them. Company’s IT department may also not be able to help as they cannot just possess every piece of hardware and software in the market. This can ultimately lead to work downtime and costs money to the company. Besides when an employee leaves a company, it becomes an additional task for the IT to transfer all company related data from their personal computers to organization’s servers.
Providing work equipment can help here as, in most cases, most of the employees’ tasks can be fulfilled with the same kind of work equipment (barring some exceptions) and hence your IT department can accordingly stock hardware and software for any such mishappening.
This can greatly reduce downtime and ultimately leads to increased productivity!
Even in situations where an employee is not able to work on his/her usual equipment, he/she can simply switch to some other equipment, provided with all his/ her data.
This also encourages shareability and interchangeability in the organization. When similar equipment is used, it simplifies IT department’s work to maintain antivirus updates and enables them to debug problems remotely. Also, when an employee leaves a company, the transition automatically becomes easier.
Having access to detailed audit trails makes finding a key a piece of cake. With a few clicks in the key management software, you can see who took the key and when was the key last taken. Our customers tell us that 95% of the keys are found within an hour. The other times serve to reveal inconsistent processes and undocumented communication to the administration.
5. Reduces losing keys
Administrators can set alerts on the return time of key removals. When exceeded, the supervisor or employee receives an e-mail, text or pop-up alert informing them. This gives the opportunity to act immediately, which increases the chances of recovery drastically.
Reducing lost keys means reducing direct and indirect costs.
If a key gets lost the cost of renewing it quickly adds up. Especially when losing a master or submaster key the process of rekeying every lock on the facility can become a major business expense. Not only the direct cost associated with the exchange of locks need to be kept in mind. The whole labor time spent by your employees could have been invested in more useful tasks.
6. Staying in compliance using an electronic key management system
Losing a master key can also entail further headaches down the line. In our 20 years of experience customers told us that insurance companies are very wary when such an event occurs, because of eventual legal repercussions. In some industries and some countries such as car dealers in the UK or home care services in Germany, insurance companies will offer better rates to businesses that use an electronic key cabinet.
7. Digital upgrade of physical offline keys
Modern electronic key management systems provide customers with a smartphone app for managers to receive real-time information and act on them on the go. Releasing a key remotely in an emergency, to receiving push notifications when a key is returned late can all reduce administrative workload. Therefore, the administrator has a digital representation of its buildings, rooms, tools, and vehicles and can interact with them quickly.
8. Enhance your internal support infrastructure with an electronic key cabinet
With video communication directly on the electronic key cabinet it provides your business with all the tools to support your workers quickly and efficiently. In case a vehicle breaks down, the employee can immediately call for assistance on the key cabinet. In case there is an issue in the server room that needs to be managed quickly, rather than finding out who is the right contact you just call the administrator group through the electronic key cabinet.
If you want to know more about electronic key management systems click here below:
