Biometric technology is no longer reserved for those high-end companies anymore. Nowadays, almost anyone can use biometric time clocks for their employee time and attendance tracking.
Over 75% of the United States consumers have used biometric technology for their fingerprint scanning, facial recognition, and hand geometry. For this reason, I find it important to talk about the pros and cons that might arise from using biometric technology at your workplace.
Simplifies payroll
Implementing biometric technology at your workplace will help the employer calculate the pay and overtime correctly. Being able to correctly pay your workers, especially part-timers and those working for you temporarily, requires accurate data.
Whether it’s for computing their workhours or overtime, biometric technology will provide more accurate and reliable data for you.
Years ago, employers only relied on the word of the supervisors, managers or the employees themselves when it came to agreeing on exact hours they have worked.
Nowadays, you don’t have to take that to chance anymore because you can verify this data in your computer systems and pay your workers the exact amount you owe them without second-guessing yourself.
Reduces time theft
The impact of time theft at workplaces can be very extreme for employers. You cannot always rely on your employee’s word about the issue of time theft, no matter how honest they claim to be.
Time theft can be intentional and accidental, but biometric technology makes tackling the problem a bit easier. With biometric systems at your workplace, you can stop time theft from your employees, which is very important for your business.
Stopping time theft will help you save money compensating your workers for hours they didn’t work for you, and it will also shape your company into a more honest environment.
Your employees understand that they’re being watched, and there will be consequences for any dishonest practices reported.
Can work without physical contact
During this pandemic, when the world is limiting physical contact instances to contain the spread of the coronavirus, biometric time clocks are very helpful.
A biometric time clock works by scanning the face, the iris, or the fingerprint to obtain the needed information about employees or staff members. Through this, any instances of workers overcrowding at one point to have their names and reporting hours written down are eliminated.
The instances of your employees signing a worksheet are also eliminated because the biometric employee time and attendance tracking act as an automatic worksheet.
This is important for workplaces with many employees because it guarantees that the chances of having an employee who has the virus infecting others are minimal.
The cons
Additional compliance requirements
The use of biometric technology at workplaces has seen a rise in privacy lawsuits. There are strict laws passed in several states such as Illinois, Texas, and Washington to govern how biometrics are recorded, stored, and used.
With the rise of biometric technology in many businesses, many people are considering how their information will be used. More states are drafting laws to ensure that biometric technology is not used to invade people’s privacy.
The state of Illinois has been one of the major states that have taken biometric employee time and attendance tracking very seriously. The state was the first to pass a law regulating biometric technology with the Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act in 2008.
The law requires all businesses in Illinois to seek their employees’ consent before collecting any biometric data from them. The law goes further to govern how the obtained data can be disclosed, profited from, protected, or retained.
Other states such as Texas have also passed similar laws. In 2009, the state passed legislation that requires employers to get the consent of their employees before collecting any biometric data and mandates that the data be destroyed within one year of being collected.
So far, there have been lawsuits filed against companies who take the biometric information of workers or even the public without their consent.
For example, in 2017, Stacy Rosenbach sued Six Flags Entertainment Corp. for scanning her son’s fingerprints to verify his identity as a season pass holder. However, the case was decided that the plaintiff ‘must allege some actual harm’ to sue under BIPA.
The court ruled that a person is only compensated for if an injury or adverse effect they may not recover from is suffered and not a technical violation.
With this momentum, more states are expected to pass more laws to protect their residents from having their information used for illegal gains.
May erode trust
The use of biometric employee time and attendance tracking may have your employees feel that you don’t trust them. Using time clocks to punch in and out to monitor your employees at work may not be very welcomed by them.
Excessive monitoring may create the feeling that employees are being micromanaged and don’t have the freedom to move around the premises as they need to, and it might contribute to a drop in morale.
This might lead to the employees being more concerned about sticking to the required timelines than doing quality work leading to poor results in the long run.
Summary
Biometric technology can be very beneficial to businesses if used properly. Ensuring that you abide by the state and federal laws and regulations about the subject will help your business avoid unnecessary and costly lawsuits that might taint its reputation to the public.
It is also good for businesses to know the limits of using biometric time clocks so that it doesn’t end up affecting them negatively. Knowing your employees and the relationship you share with them when implementing technology like this at your workplace is very important.
Do not be obsessed with keeping a strict timeline at your business and end up forgetting that your employees are humans who are prone to mistakes.
Pavel Kirijenko is a marketing associate at NCheck Bio Attendance in Lithuania. NCheck Bio Attendance is a product of UAB Neurotechnology, a company that develops neural network technologies for biometric person identification, computer vision, robotics and artificial intelligence.
