Safety in the Pandemic: Touchless ID Cards for Your Business

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to facility managers, HR executives and security directors who are tasked with ensuring workplace safety. You’ve undoubtedly made significant changes to many of your procedures, but have you considered how to make your access-control safer?

One way to maintain facility security while keeping employees and visitors safe and healthy is to minimize physical contact with surfaces. While much is still to be learned about how the virus spreads, experts agree that COVID-19 can survive on metals and plastics, potentially transmitting the virus to the next individual who touches that surface.

Traditional security measures such as metal keys, PIN touchpads and biometric fingerprint readers all rely on touch to some extent — making them less than ideal during a virus outbreak. Unless immediate and comprehensive disinfection is implemented between users, these methods are best avoided to ensure user safety.

Biometric facial-recognition systems — with their contactless ability to recognize staff members’ faces — might once have been considered the answer to security during a pandemic, but the necessity of face masks for workers make facial readers impractical right now.

RFID Technology as a Touchless ID Solution

For some businesses, advanced finger scan and iris (eye) scan technologies may provide touchless identification at access-control points, but for most, RFID options are a better solution. Proven for decades in countless applications, radio frequency identification (RFID) is now employed within contactless ID cards, badges, key fobs and wristbands. Rather than being inserted into or swiped through a card reader, these touchless ID solutions can simply be waved in front of a device to confirm identification and provide access.

RFID gives authorized users a convenient, safe, contactless way to secure admittance to restricted areas. With one wave of their RFID badge, employees can enter an area, and no one needs to perform the time-consuming chore of disinfecting surfaces after each interaction. Employees will appreciate the enhanced efficiency as well as improved safety.

There’s an added benefit for facility managers who are responsible for ensuring workplace safety: contact tracing. RFID cards and other products record movement, so if an employee does become infected with the virus, the data from these touchless ID solutions can be used to determine who else may have been exposed so that those individuals can be contacted and tested. This is an added step toward ensuring the health of your workforce and keeping your facility open safely.

Complete RFID Solutions From the ID Shop

ID Shop is your source for a full line of RFID proximity cards, tags, key fobs and wristbands that are compatible with almost any brand of radio frequency identification card reader or access control system.

Shipping is fast and ordering is easy. To get these items online, you'll need to know the card format that works for your reader as well as your facility code or site code. Call us at 844-443-7467 for expert assistance. We'll help you determine what card, tag, key fob or wristband is best for your facility and needs.

Proceed with confidence. Once you place an order, we'll send you a sample RFID product to test with your system so you can make sure it will work with your existing readers. We look forward to helping you make access control a faster, more convenient, safer experience.