Make Visitors Watch Your Safety Briefing

Make Visitors Watch Your Safety Briefing

Every site has a briefing that visitors are supposed to receive and rarely do. A laminated sheet by the door, a verbal summary if reception is not busy, a fire procedure nobody reads. SmartLobby can now require visitors to watch your video before they are allowed in.

You upload the video yourself. Earlier versions of this feature used a YouTube link — that has been replaced, so your safety briefing is no longer published on a third-party platform, and it plays with no adverts, no recommendations and no external branding.

Where the video sits in the flow

The video as a gate in the sign-in flow A visitor identifies themselves, watches the required video, and only after accepting it does the sign-in complete and the host get notified. Rejecting the video ends the sign-in with no visit recorded. Visitor arrivesVideo playsSigned in identifies themselvesAccept stays disabledhost notified until the clip ends Reject: the sign-in ends. No visit recorded, no host notified. Once accepted, the visitor is not asked again on later visits unless you replace the video.

Require watching to the end. Turn this on and the Accept button stays disabled until the clip
finishes. Use it when someone needs to be able to say, later, that the briefing was genuinely watched
rather than skipped.

Rejecting is a real outcome. If a visitor declines, the sign-in ends: no visit is recorded and no
host is notified. That is the correct behaviour for a site where the briefing is a condition of entry.

Setting it up

Open Settings in the admin dashboard, find the Required Video Approval section, and turn it on.
Upload your file, then choose which visitor types must watch it — contractors but not staff, for
instance, or everyone.

Setting What it does
Enable required video approval Turns the gate on for this account
Require watching to the end Accept stays disabled until the clip finishes
Autoplay muted Starts by itself with no sound, which browsers allow
Visitor types Chooses who has to watch it

Video requirements are deliberately simple: MP4, up to 100 MB. Leave autoplay-muted off if the
audio is part of the briefing.

Keep it short

Every visitor watches this at your reception desk, and a long briefing becomes a queue. If you are
enforcing full viewing, aim for a minute or two — long enough to cover fire exits and site rules, short
enough that nobody is standing about at 9am.

It is recorded per person, not per visit. Once a visitor has watched and accepted, they are not
asked again on later visits. Replace the video and everyone sees the new one — which is how you handle
a changed procedure without chasing people individually.

Why we dropped the YouTube version

The first version of this feature took a YouTube URL. It worked, and it was the wrong answer for a
reception desk.

Your briefing was published. A YouTube link means the video is hosted on a public platform, with a
URL anyone can share and analytics you do not control. Plenty of sites are simply not willing to put
their site rules or their floor plan there.

The player brought company. Adverts before a fire procedure, and a grid of recommended videos the
moment it ended — on a screen in your lobby, with your logo above it. Uploading the file removes all of
that: the video plays in the same full-screen viewer used for legal documents, and nothing else appears.

Where it plays

The video is stored on our servers and streamed to the device, so it works on the kiosk, in Pocket, and
in a phone-based self sign-in alike. There is no separate upload per platform and no link to keep alive.

One thing to know: the Required Video section depends on Visitor Types being enabled, since you
choose which types must watch. With visitor types off, the section shows as disabled.

Required Video Approval is available on the Standard subscription and above.

Ready to make sure every visitor has actually seen your briefing? Start your free 14-day trial →