Human resource professionals are faced with many decisions on a daily basis, not the least of which are the items that relate to payroll. In some companies, especially those with telecommuting or other off-site employees, the switch to a biometric time clock is becoming more of the norm than in the past. It’s difficult and time consuming to track hours with the use of an old style time clock and also these card-based time clocks can lead to employee hour fraud.
While your employees may be resigned to the fact that they have to punch a time clock, they may balk at the idea of a biometric time tracking system and might consider it an act of Big Brother checking up on them. The introduction of any kind of new technology, especially a time tracking one, needs to be done with grace and tact and most importantly you need to show the employee how this new system will benefit them on a daily basis. The chief employee benefits are that they can rest assured they won’t have to worry about mistakes in the calculation of their hours. They will also be better able to track not only hours worked but also time off, comp time earned and they may even be offered the option of going online to schedule vacations. This will make it easier for them and easier for the human resource professional that used to juggle vacation schedules manually.
With a biometric time keeping system you can have it programmed to recognize fingerprints or you can give your employees unique pass codes so they can log in to their own system and begin tracking their workday as soon as they start work. The system can also be set up to log in when they start, log off for breaks and log off at the end of the day. A biometric time clock eliminates the chance for employee fraud of having a fellow co-worker log them in and out for hours they might not have even worked. Open lines of communication between the human resources department and the employees will make the switch more palatable but the bottom line is the implementation of a new time and attendance system is the company’s decision.
Biometric time clocks offer your employees the chance to log in and track hours worked, whether they’re close to overtime, whether they have time available for a day off and how many sick days are left. These time clocks offer employees peace of mind and eliminate their need to go to the HR office to see if they have time available. Instead, they can look it up themselves and that offers them autonomy.
Biometric time clocks pay for themselves in the long term by offering employers the benefit of freeing up human resource employee time from not having to manually calculate hours worked. It also virtually eliminates the possibility of inaccurate time keeping and mistakes in paychecks.
