Posted on 28-Jan-09 by The Timekeeper

I’m sure you’ve heard me talk in the past about the benefits of biometric systems for management — how they prevent “buddy punching” by insuring that employees are actually physically present when they clock in. Of course, these systems also benefit employees: by ensuring the employee is physically present when they clock in or out, the system provides incontrovertible evidence of the time they spent at work, which can be crucial in the event of a wage and hour dispute.

However, sometimes employees raise objections to biometric systems, often over concerns about privacy. Usually these concerns are based on a misunderstanding of how biometric systems actually work.

Employees often mistakenly equate a time and attendance biometric system with the kind of fingerprint analysis they see on TV crime shows, and are concerned that their fingerprints or hand geometry will be added to some kind of cross-referenced database, linked up with other information about them by police or other government agencies, and used to “spy” on their activities or otherwise invade their privacy.

Over at the TimeTECH blog, they’ve done a pretty good job explaining the difference between how biometrics are used for time and attendance and how they’re used in crime scene analysis.

In a nutshell, biometric systems for time and attendance don’t store the kind of details that police and other investigators would need in order to identify an individual. Instead of storing the actual fingerprint or hand geometry, these systems simply store a mathematical formula based on the biometric data.

Bottom line, the fingerprint or hand geometry data employees provide for biometric time and attendance is not usable by law enforcement or other agencies to identify anybody.

As the folks at TimeTECH point out, often getting employees to accept a new biometric system involves simply educating them ahead of time about the limitations of the data collected and the benefits of the system.

If you’re contemplating installing a biometric time and attendance system, Acroprint Time Recorder has a pretty good set of Frequently Asked Questions about biometric time and attendance that you might want to check out. You could use that as “talking points” for discussing the system with your employees and to help you anticipate the kinds of questions they might ask. They even have a PDF version you could download and print to use as a handout if you’d like.

Computer-based biometric time tracking offers several advantages over timecards or paper-timesheet-based time recording:

• Most importantly, the biometrics provide incontrovertible proof of when employees arrived for and departed from work. This protects both management and employees from disputes over actual hours worked.
• A computer based system automatically calculates time worked (eliminating clerical errors), and downloads data directly to payroll software or service bureaus (eliminating keypunch errors). Both employees and management spend less time and experience less aggravation correcting paycheck errors.
• As a result, a computer based biometric time and attendance system saves time and money on overall payroll preparation. This boosts the business’s bottom line, which in today’s economic climate could mean the difference between “business as usual” and laying off employees (or even closing down entirely).

The key, then, to employee acceptance of a biometric system… is employee education. Make sure your employees understand what the system will do — and equally importantly, what it won’t do.

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