Biometrics technology continues its march into the workplace, with its recent implementation in a residential care home in the United Kingdom. Swallows Meadow Court now uses handprint scanners – provided by Bodet Ltd – to track employee attendance.
The move follows very closely after a similar measure in a UK recreational facility, which installed fingerprint scanners for the same purpose. In both cases the measures have been touted as administrative efficiency enhancements, saving managers time by automating the tracking of employee time.
As Swallows Meadow Court payroll administrator Marion Vickers noted in a press release, their facility offers “round the clock care so we operate a 24 hour shift system, and obtaining accurate time and attendance data was always a problem with paper-based time sheets… As we no longer have to manually check time sheets the time saving for everybody, especially payroll staff, is considerable.”
The technology also helps managers crack down on fraudulent time sheet practices on the part of employees; while Vickers referred to “exaggerated claims” on the part of staff members, this purpose was more explicitly of interest in the recent case of Mexico’s Montparnasse Pasteleria, which installed fingerprint scanners to stop widespread employee time sheet fraudulence. On a larger scale, India’s national government has started to implement biometric scanners for tracking its own employees as an effort to improve government transparency and accountability.
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December 1, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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