Considerations When Rebadging Your Workforce
Rebadging your workforce is a significant undertaking, regardless of the size of your organization. Putting it off another year might be easier, but ensuring your employees have up-to-date IDs is important for many reasons.
Why does a routine rebadge matter?
When facing this big project head-on, it’s helpful to remember the why behind your rebadge.
Security
Up-to-date visual IDs play a massive role in security. As much as we hate to admit it, most of us don’t look like we did ten years ago. A few extra pounds, a haircut, cosmetic surgery, or facial hair can cause a person to look drastically different than their current photo ID. It’s important to keep accurate representation of your employees’ appearances. Additionally, old badges can lack security features that make them easier to copy or misuse. These features include UV links, hologram-like security seals, photo ghosting, micro printing, and RFID technology.
Brand Continuity
Company rebrands or mergers will require an employee-wide rebadge. When your brand representation changes, you want to ensure that your employee ID badges reflect your current brand.
Increased Workforce
You may have experienced a dramatic increase in your workforce; this could mean adding a few extra employees or new departments. Rebadging your workforce allows you to ensure everyone has unique and accurate identification that other employees or departments can easily recognize.
Complying with Industry Standards
Industry standards and government regulations will continue to change, and you are responsible for ensuring your company is compliant. Maintaining up-to-date employee information and photo ID badges is part of this and dramatically reduces liability. Compliance is crucial when considering government-regulated businesses and the healthcare industry.
Facial Recognition Access Control
Facial recognition access control is a newer security feature you may not be using yet, but it never hurts to plan ahead. This biometric solution allows an individual or employee to access a door or facility within an organization using facial or fingerprint recognition. Employee ID photos need to be current and updated regularly for facial recognition to be effective.
Rebadging Options
Once you’ve decided to start the rebadge process, you and your organization have several different options when it comes to how you want to accomplish this for your workforce. Depending on your available resources, one of these solutions might be the winner for your organization.
In-House Rebadge
If you have all the necessary resources, like badge production software, printers, cards, the means to capture photos, executive buy-in, time to plan, and necessary personnel, you can handle the production and distribution of the new ID badges in-house. This option allows you to control the entire process and could save the organization money. It also has the potential to be a huge thorn in your side. It’s essential to think about opportunity cost when evaluating options. Every hour you spend on the rebadge is an hour you can’t spend on another project.
Outsourced or Hybrid Rebadge
If you aren’t in a position to conduct the rebadge in-house, it will be vital to find the right rebadging partner to help with the project. With multiple steps in the process, determining which pieces of the rebadging puzzle your partner will take responsibility for is the first step. For example, you may have a printer and cards but need help capturing quality ID photos. On the other hand, you may want your rebadging partner to produce the cards offsite and ship them to employees. It all depends on who owns which steps in the rebading workflow.
You must also consider the levels of data you’re required to share, which depend on the responsibilities you give the rebadging partner. Either way, the necessary data must be shared with the rebadging partner so they have the information they need to execute the rebadge effectively. Many of our partners have extensive rebadging experience. Drop us a line, and we can connect you with the right one for your situation.
Capturing quality ID photos
The long pole on the tent of any rebadge has always been capturing a quality ID photo. We’ve talked with many organizations who reluctantly live with the security risk of outdated ID photos to avoid the hassle of getting new images. They won’t bother updating the pictures during the rebadge, which will result in many ID photos that don’t represent the person possessing the badge. Some organizations are brave enough to attempt the painful process of making ID photos current, and we’ve seen them deploy several different strategies to accomplish this goal.
Pop-up photo stations
The rebadging partner or the organization purchases the equipment to assemble pop-up photo stations. Employees drive to one of these photo stations to submit their ID photos and get new badges. When organizations are geographically distributed, the energy and effort needed for this strategy increases, equalling more equipment, staffing, variability, scheduling, overhead, and headaches.
Email your ID photos
Another way organizations try to capture quality ID photos is by asking employees to submit their photos remotely through email. This is sometimes easier for the employee but creates much more work for the security team. Security professionals, who should be working on more important problems, are left with the manual work of obtaining a quality image - rotating, cropping, removing the background, denying, and approving photos. They even have to remind the employee (multiple times in many cases) to submit their ID photo.
Use RemotePhoto
RemotePhoto takes the hassle out of ID headshots. Employees submit a photo remotely to a centralized site. When run through our AI, each ID photo is automatically standardized. The customizable settings allow each photo to be resized, cropped, rotated, background removed, approved, and denied according to your specific requirements. We don’t want you to waste mental energy on ID photos. You have enough on your plate. We’ll work with your organization or your rebadging partner to deliver quality ID photos to take the stress out of your next rebadge.
Hear about a recent rebadge success!
Recently, CloudCard CEO, Luke Rettstatt, spoke with Lindsay Martin-Nez, CEO of BadgePass, on her Badge Banter podcast.
They discuss how RemotePhoto and BadgePass were able to work together to streamline the ID process for a large healthcare organization undertaking a huge, multi-campus rebadge. Hear how they solved the issues of a bad employee experience, wasted time, and even helped the company retain new hires through solutions offered by RemotePhoto and BadgePass. The bottom line: there is immense value in delivering a seamless ID badge experience.
Watch the video below!
