Rank: New forum user 
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Can anyone advise on the effectiveness of doing a roll call for emergency evacuations? Is it possible to give a 100% account that the building has been fully evacuated. On most evacuation test I'm sure we all have the issue of somebody seeing somebody on site but they have not signed in or they have not seen them today. In a large workplace of >300 staff is it acceptable to just use the fire marshals to sweep the building and confirm at the assembly point that their area is clear?
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Rank: Forum user
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A full sweep of the building by allocating zones for each of your fire marshals and allowing for appropriate holiday/sickness cover is probably one of the only most effective ways of ensuring a building is fully evacuated.
You could support this with a roll call but its not a requirement, if its something that you wish to do but find its quite difficult to co-ordinate then you could consider conducting a roll call by department.
I would suggest that all visitors to the site are requested to sign in and out when entering and leaving the premises.
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Rank: Super forum user
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Roll calls at assembly points are useful but are never completely effective and should not be relied upon alone in an evacuation procedure.
Managers, engineers and visitors are in my experience very bad - not signing in, and also not signing out - you just don't know if they are still on site.
Having Fire Marshalls sweeping areas aims to ensure no-one is still in the building, and with 300+ employees I would say sweeps are essential.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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Hate to say it but the best way of checking who is/is not in your building should be one of the findings of your fire safety risk assessment. It all depends on the type of building you have. For example, this office has max. 12 people in one room. We can do a quick name check. Our main London office has several hundred people over ten floors, so we do a sweep. In both cases this is determined by the FRSA,
John
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Rank: Super forum user
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Unless the organisation is very small with everyone within one building and them never leaving it, lists are just waste of time. As other people have said what you need is a sweep system: designated people check the buildings as they leave and make sure everyone leaves during the evacuation.
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Rank: Forum user
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We moved a few years ago, onto a fire marshall sweep.
Like others have said, the lists were more trouble than they were worth.
People forgetting to sign in, forgetting to sign out, fire marshalls forgetting to pass their documents to their deputy if they were off, etc, etc,
We have about 500 employees and fire marshalls who sweep on the way out and it works much better
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Rank: Super forum user 
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Previously worked in university accommodation- sweeping sleeping/ studying students is much easier than roll calls! It depends on how your organisation is- Sweeps are generally better for buildings with lots of people and/ or lots of rooms, roll calls probably better suit smaller areas
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Rank: New forum user
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Great feedback and it's given me some reassurance to review the FSRA.
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Rank: Super forum user
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JohnW wrote:Roll calls at assembly points are useful but are never completely effective and should not be relied upon alone in an evacuation procedure.
Managers, engineers and visitors are in my experience very bad - not signing in, and also not signing out - you just don't know if they are still on site.
Having Fire Marshalls sweeping areas aims to ensure no-one is still in the building, and with 300+ employees I would say sweeps are essential.
So yes we rely mainly on the sweeps but we still do the roll calls - it gets everyone involved in the evacuation process, and we want to maintain some discipline with regard to signing in and signing out partly for other security reasons :o)
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