Running the Gauntlet

Running the Gauntlet

Back to work needs to be well and good

Not long ago when visiting a colleague’s office, it was protocol to arrive early to run the gauntlet of the visitor management check-in that awaited, a process that might gladly be endured now if just for a brief return to some normalcy. Before the pandemic, many visitor management procedures were under scrutiny, with many organizations making visitor management improvements a top-level initiative. As we prepare our back-to-work efforts, visitor management will serve as the front lines for mitigating health risks in offices and facilities.

A TRUST RELATIONSHIP

Let’s take a step back. At its core, identity management helps an organization distinguish who it knows, while maintaining and improving this knowledge throughout an individual’s affiliation with the organization. When we make a new employee hire, for example, we use an I-9 or similar process by which we positively identify someone using government-issued identification. Often, background checks are in place to ensure suitability for the workplace, kickstarting a trust relationship rather than forming it organically over months and years.

Just as most organizations do not have the time to establish their employees’ identities and trustworthiness naturally, there is often less time for visitors. This is why visitor management is one of the highest-risk activities in a physical security program. The result of visitor management is an organization’s ability to routinely admit people they know the least about -- visitors who now walk among trusted employees -- as though the visitors were trusted in a similar fashion.

Prior to the pandemic, this risk was being addressed by “high assurance” visitor management systems. These systems work rapidly to establish a visitor’s identity, often before they arrive in the lobby. The day of the visit is preceded by continuous vetting and, upon arrival, the system binds a visitor to a high-assurance credential.

That credential allows for tracking of the visitor’s interaction with and passage through the access control systems also used by the employees. High assurance visitor management seeks to elevate identity management for visitors to mimic the degree of vetting that we already perform for employees. As COVID-19 vaccinations roll out and organizations form their backto- work plans, the need to balance identity management for employees and visitors has moved to center stage. Here’s why:

The word is suitability, but with a twist. In corporate identity management, suitability historically meant background checks on employees and occasionally visitors. At the most, forward-leaning enterprises and throughout the intelligence community, this is augmented with reputational data locally captured from previous interactions with a person and/ or behavioral deviations from a historical reputation baseline.

FAITH IN THE FUTURE

These are the generally accepted ways to gain confidence in suitability. It is often said that trust is faith in future performance based on past behavior, which is the way our brains are wired to trust. We listen more often to and believe in information that confirms what we want to believe.

Behavioral psychologists know this as confirmation bias. When it comes to making good security decisions, another aspect of our trust psychology works against us. The Harvard Business Review succinctly captures this in a 2009 article about rethinking trust: “Once we’ve made a decision to trust, we tend not to revisit it.”

These effects can be seen in our everyday lives right now. Our bias might lead us to believe our friends and families are at a lower risk of actively carrying COVID-19 than a coughing stranger in a store. These natural biases work against our ability to make good and repeatable security decisions, which challenges our back-to-work initiatives.

Organizations will ask their security teams to perform some degree of wellness checking on understandably anxious employees who just spent a minimum of a year and a half working from home. Employees will scrutinize security programs and back-to-work safety measures. An obvious area where a back-to-work program might falter is if an organization has different wellness requirements for employees and visitors. High assurance visitor management was designed to close the gap between the handling of employees and visitors in ways not seen by most employees. Wellness screening will now put disparities on full display.

Successful back-to-work initiatives necessarily include wellness screenings, which are the tip of the spear as we welcome people back into our spaces. However, not all wellness screening is created equal. Here are five things to consider as you move forward with your back-to-work initiatives. Pay special attention to the areas visible to your employees. Direct observation will help employees gain confidence in workplace safety.

Wellness is the new suitable. While wellness is a new dimension of suitability, it does not replace background checks. Background checks continue to be essential for higher security facilities. Wellness checking is important for every facility.

Wellness is a temporal and dynamic attribute. Wellness screenings must occur daily, as today’s results have no bearing on tomorrow. Employees we know and see in the office daily represent the identical wellness risk as a visitor we have never seen before. Wellness screenings must be done for everybody -- every day -- using the same process and same tools. If any person will be accessing any part of a facility where any of your employees might be, wellness screening must be done.

Wellness screening is for, not by humans. In any security discipline, the decision between manual security controls and investment in automated controls is expressed in two questions: Is this a repetitious activity (and inherently risks degradation over time)? What is the impact/cost of any failure of the control? Even without the bias challenges, wellness screening should not be performed manually.

Wellness screening can be efficient. Security programs have tried to make physical access and visitor management as low friction as possible and should do the same for wellness screening. Wellness screenings are here to stay, as we do not know what pandemic episodes loom in our future. If you make this necessity bearable, it won’t befall the same fate as other security initiatives that didn’t take user experience into account. A wellness screening process too cumbersome will first suffer active attempts to circumvent it, maturing to subversion and naturally concluding with abandonment.

Make wellness matter. Security programs measure the effectiveness of their security controls. If a wellness screening capability has no discernable effect, it will be both ineffective and obvious to the entire organization that it is just security theater. Demonstrating that wellness screening affects access to the facility in an automated way can generate confidence in the safety of a workplace.

An organization that implements a capability to automatically disable facility access for those who fail wellness screening (or disable access for everyone nightly) can inspire confidence with this suitability information. In this context, wellness screening is due diligence. Doing something with the knowledge gained is due care. Considering how liability has historically been apportioned in similar situations, this requires careful examination by risk, legal and human resource departments.

The best security capabilities deployed in recent times all share one quality: innovation. Systems that achieved their protective goal but brought other added value in so doing. As security practitioners, we should be looking for ways to do this. Back-to-work represents a possibly once-in-a-career opportunity to address a risk that no one has worked on before. Managing ever-changing and evolving risks is our norm. It’s up to us to make back-to-work, work well.

This article originally appeared in the April 2021 issue of Security Today.

Featured

  • Survey Shows Election Anxiety Crosses Party Lines

    New reports of election worker intimidation are raising concerns about election interference. A majority of Americans (71%) are worried about voter intimidation or safety at the polls, and 75% want security cameras at their voting place, according to a new national survey. Read Now

  • 66 Percent of Cybersecurity Pros Say Job Stress is Growing

    Sixty-six percent of cybersecurity professionals say their role is more stressful now than it was five years ago, according to the newly released 2024 State of Cybersecurity survey report from ISACA, a global professional association advancing trust in technology. Read Now

  • Live from GSX 2024: Post-Show Recap

    Another great edition of GSX is in the books! We’d like to thank our great partners for this years event, NAPCO, LVT, Eagle Eye Networks and Hirsch, for working with us and allowing us to highlight some of the great solutions the companies were showcasing during the crowded show. Read Now

    • Industry Events
    • GSX
  • Research: Cybersecurity Success Hinges on Full Organizational Support

    Cybersecurity is the top technology priority for the vast majority of organizations, but moving from aspiration to reality requires a top-to-bottom commitment that many companies have yet to make, according to new research released today by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the technology industry and workforce. Read Now

Featured Cybersecurity

Webinars

New Products

  • Camden CV-7600 High Security Card Readers

    Camden CV-7600 High Security Card Readers

    Camden Door Controls has relaunched its CV-7600 card readers in response to growing market demand for a more secure alternative to standard proximity credentials that can be easily cloned. CV-7600 readers support MIFARE DESFire EV1 & EV2 encryption technology credentials, making them virtually clone-proof and highly secure. 3

  • PE80 Series

    PE80 Series by SARGENT / ED4000/PED5000 Series by Corbin Russwin

    ASSA ABLOY, a global leader in access solutions, has announced the launch of two next generation exit devices from long-standing leaders in the premium exit device market: the PE80 Series by SARGENT and the PED4000/PED5000 Series by Corbin Russwin. These new exit devices boast industry-first features that are specifically designed to provide enhanced safety, security and convenience, setting new standards for exit solutions. The SARGENT PE80 and Corbin Russwin PED4000/PED5000 Series exit devices are engineered to meet the ever-evolving needs of modern buildings. Featuring the high strength, security and durability that ASSA ABLOY is known for, the new exit devices deliver several innovative, industry-first features in addition to elegant design finishes for every opening. 3

  • Connect ONE’s powerful cloud-hosted management platform provides the means to tailor lockdowns and emergency mass notifications throughout a facility – while simultaneously alerting occupants to hazards or next steps, like evacuation.

    Connect ONE®

    Connect ONE’s powerful cloud-hosted management platform provides the means to tailor lockdowns and emergency mass notifications throughout a facility – while simultaneously alerting occupants to hazards or next steps, like evacuation. 3