The Landlord Owns the Door. Your Employees Use It. At Fifty Leased Sites, Exit Route Compliance Is Decided by Whoever Locked Up Last.

Every company with a large portfolio of leased sites has a policy that says exits must be kept clear and unlocked during working hours. It is in the employee handbook, it is in the site opening checklist, and it is usually in the fire safety section of the annual training. It is also very likely to be broken, quietly, at some of the sites, on some of the days, for reasons that make perfect sense to the person who broke it.

The back door gets chained after a theft. A pallet of new inventory sits in front of the side exit because the stockroom is full. A tenant improvement left a door that opens with a key from the inside. The landlord's contractor swapped the hardware over the weekend. None of these decisions were made by anyone at headquarters, and none of them show up in any report that headquarters reads. The question this post addresses is narrow: what do OSHA's exit route standards actually require of the employer at each location, and why does a multi-site, mostly leased footprint make those requirements so hard to see from the center?

What the standards ask of the employer

OSHA's exit route requirements for general industry sit in Subpart E, in 29 CFR 1910.34 through 1910.39. Two sections carry most of the day-to-day weight. Section 1910.36 covers the design and construction of exit routes. Section 1910.37 covers maintaining them, along with safeguards and operational features such as lighting and marking.

Start with the doors. Under 1910.36(d), an exit route door must be unlocked. It has to be possible to open it from the inside at any time without keys, tools, or special knowledge. A device such as a panic bar that locks only from the outside is permitted on exit discharge doors, which tells you what the rule is protecting: a person leaving must always be able to leave, while a person outside may be kept out.

Paragraph (b) of 1910.36 addresses the number of routes. A workplace must generally have at least two exit routes so employees can evacuate promptly, and more if the number of employees, the size of the building, or its arrangement means two would not be enough. There is a narrow exception for small or simple buildings where a single route will do, but that is a conclusion to be reached deliberately for a given building rather than assumed.

Then comes the maintenance standard. Section 1910.37(a) requires exit routes to be free and unobstructed. No materials or equipment may be placed, even temporarily, within an exit route. The exit access may not pass through a room that can be locked, and may not lead into a dead-end corridor. Safeguards meant to protect employees in an emergency, such as sprinklers, alarm systems, fire doors and exit lighting, must be kept in proper working order. Section 1910.37(b) requires exit signs, and the rest of that section addresses visibility of the signs and the lighting of the route.

Nothing in those paragraphs turns on who owns the building. The employer's duty is stated in terms of the workplace where its employees work. A lease may allocate the cost and the responsibility for repairs between landlord and tenant, and it may be perfectly clear about who must replace a broken door closer. It does not change what an inspector will observe when they walk through the door.

Why leased portfolios make the problem harder

At a single owner-occupied plant, the same people control the building and the operation. If the exit door is a problem, someone with authority over both can fix it. At a portfolio of leased sites, the authority is split. The tenant controls how the space is used day to day, which means what is stored where, who has keys, and whether the back door is propped, chained or alarmed. The landlord controls the structure and often the hardware, the common areas, the shared corridors, and sometimes the fire alarm panel. OSHA's multi-employer worksite policy exists because responsibility on a shared site can reach more than one party, and a tenant should not assume that being a tenant ends its exposure.

Three patterns recur.

The first is the local security fix. Retail, food service and distribution sites face theft and after-hours break-ins. The manager's quick response is hardware: a chain, a deadbolt, a second lock on the rear door, a bar across it. These measures are made by someone who needs the problem solved this week, and the exit rule is not in their mind. Because the fix is cheap and informal, no purchase order or work order captures it.

The second is storage creep. Stockrooms fill, seasonal merchandise arrives, and the open floor near the back door looks like unused space. Storage in an exit route is easy to create and hard to notice from outside, since a photo of the sales floor shows nothing and a photo of the back hall shows everything.

The third is change without notice. A landlord replaces hardware, a tenant improvement moves a wall, a neighboring suite takes over a corridor, or a new demising wall creates a route through a room that can be locked. The tenant company's real estate group may have signed off on the plan without anyone from safety seeing it, because the project looked like construction rather than a change to the means of egress.

What the center cannot see

Corporate safety programs usually address exits through a checklist and an annual certification. The checklist has a line for exit doors and the site manager checks it. The result looks like compliance: every site reports every door unlocked and unobstructed on the day of the checklist. What it cannot show is the state of the door at the moment the checklist was not being completed.

The more useful question is where the evidence of exit status can come from without relying on the manager's attestation. Several sources exist, though few portfolios link them. Insurance and fire-marshal inspections produce findings about exits at individual sites that rarely reach the central safety function. Facilities work orders show when hardware was changed. Loss-prevention incident reports show which sites had break-ins, and those are the sites most likely to have added locks. Real estate and lease files show alterations. Each is held by a different team, and each says something about the condition of the exits.

Emergency planning compounds the gap. The emergency action plan under 1910.38 is supposed to describe evacuation procedures and exit route assignments for the workplace. A company-wide template that says "use the nearest exit" has no information about which exit is chained at site 31. We discuss the plan-level version of this problem in our piece on emergency action plan consistency; here the point is that the plan and the physical door can drift apart without anyone noticing.

Closing the visibility gap without building a bureaucracy

A workable program has four parts, and none of them requires a safety department at every site.

First, make the exit door a controlled item rather than a checklist line. Any change to hardware on a door that is part of an exit route should require a work order, and the work order process should route a question to someone who knows the rule. That catches the landlord's weekend swap if the landlord agrees to notify, and it catches the manager's chain if the purchase path for locks is not a petty-cash errand.

Second, give sites an approved answer to the security problem that does not involve locking the exit. Managers chain doors because they have a theft problem and no alternative. A door alarm that sounds when the exit is used, a delayed-egress arrangement where the local fire code permits it, or camera coverage of the rear door are options, and which of them is available depends on the building and the jurisdiction. If the company does not offer an approved option, it should expect managers to improvise.

Third, collect evidence that does not come from the manager. A photograph of the rear hall and the exit door, taken at an unannounced time by a district manager, a loss-prevention visit or a facilities technician, tells more than a signed form. The same applies to date-stamped photos at every site visit, which require nothing but a phone.

Fourth, write exit status into the lease process. New leases and renewals are the moment to ask who must notify whom before changing doors, alarms and walls. Existing leases may already say; many portfolios have never read them for this purpose.

The portfolio question to ask

The useful question at the top of a company is not whether every site has a policy on exits. It is which sites have changed their doors, locks or storage since the last verified walk-through, and who verified it. That list is short when the process works. When no one can produce it, the exposure is not abstract: an inspector who finds one chained door at one site will see a company that wrote a policy and could not tell whether it was followed, and a worker in a real emergency will find out in the worst possible way.

Local fire codes, state plan requirements and lease terms may add obligations beyond the federal standards described here, and some jurisdictions administer their own occupational safety programs. This post is general information and not legal advice, and following it does not guarantee compliance at any location.