Tracking Worker Whereabouts May Become More Common

When disaster strikes, large companies may know instantly what data and equipment are damaged, but many can’t do the same for the workers and visitors who come to their offices.

The nation’s white-collar workers are increasingly mobile and untethered by punch clocks or regulated shifts, one reason it has taken days to determine who was in harm’s way when hijacked jetliners rammed into the World Trade Center towers.

The same technology that companies use to make their offices secure--such as electronic employee identification cards that open locked doors--also can track the people who come onto their grounds. But experts say few firms invest in that technology.

“The biggest issue right now is most people don’t have a good feel for where people are or even whether they were at work,” said Raymond A. Parker, chief executive of Phrst & Co., a Miami-based human resources and crisis management firm assisting companies in New York. “That’s why authorities are having trouble figuring out where they are.”

Crisis management experts say the terrorist attacks may prompt a broader range of companies to more closely monitor workers’ whereabouts, even at the risk of being accused of intruding on personal freedoms.

Rosters Unreliable

Old-fashioned printed rosters that used to account for employees are slow, cumbersome and often ineffective. Rosters frequently leave out recent personnel changes. At some medium and small companies, those lists are maintained in a single location and are lost in an emergency, such as a fire or earthquake. And rosters don’t show, at any given moment, who was outside smoking, down the street picking up dry-cleaning, or on vacation, experts said.

Kemper Insurance Cos. kept an up-to-date computerized list of its World Trade Center employees at its headquarters in Long Grove, Ill., giving the firm a running start in accounting for the 225 people who worked on the 35th and 36th floors of the first tower struck Tuesday.

“It’s updated pretty regularly based on hiring and departures,” spokeswoman Megan Grabos said.

A team of 35 people in the human resources department began calling employees’ homes and emergency contacts. “We wanted to talk to everybody or a spouse who was in the company of the employee,” she said.

By early Wednesday, Kemper had determined that none of its employees was seriously injured and it had accounted for all but one.

“A senior vice president of the company . . . went to her apartment and knocked on her door,” Grabos said. “She was home but not answering the phone.”

But even companies that have the best emergency plans can have problems accounting for workers, said John Laye, managing partner of Contingency Management Consultants of Moraga, Calif.

“You grab the [employee] list as you go out the door for a fire evacuation and everybody musters in the park across the street, and somebody says, ‘Sally’s missing,’ ” he said. “And Sally’s cube-mate says, ‘Don’t you remember? Sally had to be in Cleveland.’ And then they can’t find George, and somebody says he went out for coffee. It’s haphazard. The only way to do it is to require workers to swipe cards at the door.

“Most companies don’t go to that trouble, and it’s tough to enforce.”

So employers who use technology to check and control who comes into their offices often don’t pay attention to who goes out, security experts said. Even more sophisticated than swipe cards are sensors that wirelessly read and record the identification tags worn by employees or visitors, logging information when they go through a doorway.

Such a network electronically records who is entering, leaving and at what time, said Derek Trimble, vice president of marketing and new product development for Johnson Controls Inc.’s security division in Simi Valley.

The same identification tags can be used in the security systems for company computer networks, Trimble said, which would provide a more precise picture of where employees were working the day of a disaster. Some companies go one controversial step further, collecting keystroke data that reveals when workers are at their desks.

The greater the degree of monitoring, though, the more the employer looks like Big Brother.

“There’s always a balance that has to be struck, but there are two things that are typically most important to employees: safety and convenience,” said Debbie Coller, spokeswoman for security-equipment maker Sensormatic Electronics Corp. of Boca Raton, Fla.

Hefty Price Tag

Adding sensors to more rooms adds precision, but it also raises the price tag of a security system. Trimble said a rough estimate is $2,000 per doorway for the sensors, although the cost is dropping.

Even sensor systems aren’t fool-proof. Because identification badges can be dropped or exchanged, knowing that someone’s badge is in the conference room doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is there.

For that degree of certainty, companies have to use sensors that read uniquely personal information, such as a fingerprint, a retinal scan or the shape of a face.

Not only are such devices expensive, Trimble said, they also can’t handle a group of workers racing out of a building. But Coller said the speed of these technologies has improved to the point that some can identify people without stopping them.

And the data collected by doorway sensors won’t do rescuers a bit of good if it’s kept on-site, where it’s as vulnerable as the employees. But that’s just where most companies keep the electronic records of who comes into and out of their buildings, security experts said.

At the World Trade Center, most companies have done their best, given that most disaster planning is not intended to deal with a crisis of that magnitude, said Ed Reilly, president of New York- based American Management Assn.

“It’s intended to deal with a disaster to your company, not this disaster to the city,” Reilly said. “This is a wholly different sort of experience.”