Jess FischerTired of constantly checking in with your team to make sure they’ve completed their assigned rounds? Not only is this process tedious, it’s time consuming, an increase on your workload, and leaves plenty of room for human error.
Manual check-ins add an additional task to the already busy schedules of teams and their managers. They make it harder to stay vigilant and take away valuable time away from other important tasks, leading to delays and negatively impacting productivity and employee morale.
When security guards, housekeepers, or nurses forget to complete or record a check-in, it can lead to liability and safety concerns. Not to mention, difficult conversations when managers have to hold staff accountable.
The time and resources spent on manual check-ins should be redirected towards more value-added activities that contribute directly to the team’s goals and objectives. Organizations should consider implementing an automated check-in system that streamlines the process, ensures compliance, and minimizes the negative impact on teams.
Introducing Rounds
With Rounds, managers will be able to passively track scheduled rounds or patrols and automatically receive a notification when an employee has missed their rotation. This eliminates the need for manual entry with paper logs, QR codes, or NFC scans.
As teams carry Relay devices on their rounds, the Relay devices will pick up indoor location readings from our bluetooth indoor location beacons, which automatically marks the round as complete.
Relay users can then access all logs in Relay dashboard and can even receive a notification any time a round is missed.
How does Rounds work?
The first step is configuring Relay’s bluetooth indoor location beacons in each area staff needs to visit. Once these beacons are placed in each area, managers can configure the Rounds workflow in their Relay dashboard by noting the following:
- Which Relay devices are responsible for making rounds?
- How frequently does each room need to be visited?
- If a round is missed, who would need to be notified?
Once everything is set up, staff can simply walk their rounds with their Relay device, and as they walk the established route, Relay devices scan for indoor locations in real time and complete rounds as they near a beacon. If a rotation is missed, users will receive a notification. All completions and misses are stored and accessible in the Relay dashboard.
“Rounds has made my life a lot easier. Now I don’t have to try to track down people to find out whether a patrol was done, what time it was done, and who was it done by. I can simply go on to the Relay dashboard and pull up the historical information. Whereas before everything was kind of estimated times.”
Rich O’Donnell, Director of Security, Raleigh Marriott City Center
Setting up Rounds in the Relay Dashboard
In Dash, navigate to Locations and choose Rounds. Click Create Rounds.
Name the Round (e.g. Security Patrol, Cleaning Rounds), and then select which group need to complete the Rounds and which group needs to be notified when a Round is missed.
Then, set the Primary interval of how often a location needs to be checked and choose which buildings, floors, and rooms need to be visited. The interval timer will start when the last Relay device has left the area.
Once the Rounds have been configured, users can view and edit the configuration within the View Configuration section in Relay’s dashboard.
To view Rounds data, go to the View Summary sections in Relay’s Dashboard to see a room-by-room number of completions and misses over a time period, or the View Logs section to review individual logs containing each completed or missed patrol, including who completed the patrol and the time at which it was completed or missed.
Virtual users set up as Notifiers will receive a notification in the Dashboard or on their phone from the Relay App any time a Round has been missed.
Rounds in Action
We checked in with Rich O’Donnell, Director of Security at The Raleigh Marriott City Center, who has been piloting Rounds at the hotel for six months. Before implementing Rounds, he relied on the honesty and integrity of his security officers to go out and do the required patrols he asked them to do. Now, Relay is keeping track of these rotations for him. Here’s what he had to say about the impact Rounds has had on his team.
“The Rounds feature is great because now as the officers walk the building, their location is tracked. I have the ability to set up mandatory patrols that I want done on a particular time basis. And if when those time intervals are hit, a patrol hasn’t been done, it sends an audible reminder to all of the security Relays, advising them that the patrol hasn’t been done yet. It gives them that gentle nudge that some people need to make sure that they go out and get those patrols taken care of.”
“The other thing it helps out with is when there’s a complaint of some kind, I can go in, pull up the historical records and go and see, ‘Hey, did somebody actually go up there to investigate when we had a report of a noise complaint on the floor’. I can pull it up and see. ‘Yeah, somebody was up there’. Rounds has definitely shortened the amount of time it takes for me to do some of those investigations. I’m able to pull up that information in moments compared to it taking me sometimes an hour to try and get in touch with the security officer that was here that night.”
“I would highly recommend it. I think it’s fantastic. It gives me the peace of mind to know that I can manage my team in a very time effective manner and that I’m getting accurate information that is super helpful and saves me a lot of time.”
Removing Manual Headaches
Now, frontline workers across industries can customize and automate the manual processes that keep them from focusing on the tasks that matter most.
Whatever your reason for making rounds, Relay can help upgrade your operations, improving team effectiveness all around. Employees feel good about keeping their focus on the work, not the process, while managers spend more time focusing on people instead of paperwork.
Check out all of our new enhancements here.
