The Biometric Attendance: A Boon or a Bane

The Inventions which benefited humankind

There are few inventions and discoveries in the world which have hugely benefited mankind. Electricity by Volta, Radio by Marconi, Television by J.L Baird, Air Conditioning by W Carrier and so on. We remember their names fondly as they have greatly impacted our lives. We are now moving in an era of IoT or Internet of things.  All these devices like an AC or an Oven in the kitchen will be connected by Wi-Fi. They can be operated from a remote distance just by a press of a button.

However, I would like to know the name of the person who invented the Biometric attendance system. This person must be having a disturbed domestic life. He would leave for office early in the morning reaching before time. The scene of an empty office early in the morning gave him a feeling of loneliness. His colleagues preferred reporting on time and not before time.  This early morning loneliness was killing him. So,one day he decided to invent the machine which changed the offices forever.

Biometric Attendance: Reporting on Time

This Biometric attendance machine ensured that henceforth all employees report to the office on time irrespective of whether they had a reason or not to get late. Organisations benefited a lot, as they had the entire workforce reporting on time. But this one invention took the entire fun away from the office. The higher-ups in the company were no more willing to listen to  excuses of late coming to office. Getting held up in a traffic jam due to a republic day parade rehearsal or attending a parent-teachers meeting had no meaning for the machine.

In earlier times you could get away with one of the above reasons. Bosses were compassionate and willing to understand the situation. On the other hand, this heartless machine was created with the sole purpose of defeating all human emotions. It would record an employees daily entry in the office to the 1/100th of a second.

This magical Biometric attendance machine surprisingly, is not very employee friendly. It works on a clock that would always run 5 minutes ahead of time when you report to the office. Similarly, it would slow down by 5 minutes when you leave the office. The machine is able to attract a crowd in the morning as well as evenings. In the morning, you can see people leaving their cars unparked on the road just to punch on time. In the evening, a crowd gathers around the machine at 5.29 pm, just waiting for that 1 minute to lapse before they can punch out.

The Biometric Attendance Machine is Weather proof

The Biometric attendance machine is weather resistant. It works round the season irrespective of winters or summers, snowfall or rainfall. The machine would never understand an employee reporting late to office due to hostile weather. It is difficult to explain to the machine the winters of Delhi. A season, when one just doesn’t feel like leaving a warm and cozy bed in the morning. In a city covered by a dense blanket of fog, only an idiot will leave the bed early to reach office on time.

The Biometric attendance machine working in Mumbai has never traveled on the locals and never enjoyed the rains. The Kolkata machine has never witnessed a bandh (Strike). Moreover, the machine brought one of the most neglected parameters in appraisals to the forefront. i.e. Punctuality. An employee who has achieved his targets, is a go-getter, has a lot of initiative and passion, is not sure if he will get the best increments. Obviously, his seniors have got a reason to exclude him from the list giving punctuality as a reason. 

After all, it’s a machine not human

The Biometric attendance machine is like a Terminator machine. It will never understand an employees personal problems. A woman employee couldn’t report to the office as her son was running a high fever and had to be taken to the doctor. A father got late because the class teacher has complained to the wife that she would like to meet the father once in the parents teachers meeting. Anyway, it is too much to expect from a machine. We are living in a world where humans fail to understand the problems of their fellow humans, leave aside a machine.

Artificial Intelligence will lead to automation leading to job scarcity

The Biometric attendance machine can be considered one of the trigger versions of Artificial Intelligence. But if this is the start then I am damm scared of what the future has in store in for us.

47% of American jobs are at high risk because of Automation. The prediction of an apocalypse of the job market by the mid-2030’s has come from a paper published in 2013 by two Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. As per their findings occupations accounting for 47% of current American jobs fell into the high-risk category. This includes those in office administration, sales, and various service industries. In other words, compared with other professions, they are the most vulnerable to automation. The Biometric attendance monitoring can be easily classified as an office administration function.

Read how artificial intelligence will impact human work force. Click on the link:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vishalmarria/2019/01/11/the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-in-the-workplace/#36d4421173d4

The Biometric Attendance Machine: Friend or Foe of HR

In some quarters of the corporate circle, there is a murmur whether to do away with this heartless machine. I consider it as one of the biggest hindrances in the Work-Life balance practice. The HR heads, serious to implement a Work-Life balance culture, should explore better employee friendly attendance monitoring system.  We can then do away with the Biometric attendance in that case.

I have a solution in mind. Employees who log in 95% and above on the punctuality meter for 3 months in a row should be exempted from it. They should be allowed to sign a manual register. This will help most of the employees to score high on the punctuality meter apart from making them more responsible. On the other hand HR will be seen as a department keen on implementing employee-friendly practices. It is time for humans to be more humane and treat humans as humans and not machines.

Read more such stories on the following links:

The Corporate Lingo

Customer Delight