We’re in an era when employees could be given an iris scan to confirm their identity for access to your office. Or you could easily scan their fingerprints. Or you could use facial recognition powered by artificial intelligence.
The point is, there are ways to identify and track employees that require them to remember no passwords and provide no identification such as driver’s licenses or badges.
Some are afraid of this possibility, but I prefer it. I would love to never have to remember another username and password again, and instead, let my face be my ticket for gaining access.
In fact, I use facial recognition with more than one of the apps on my phone. It may be naïve of me, but I don’t spend a minute ever worrying about the security of facial recognition or recognition of my identity via any other biometric.
Clocking in via Fingerprint?
Some companies now have employees clock in using their fingerprints. Philip Drost of CBC Radio writes about this trend: “According to Hannah Johnston, who specializes in the digitalization of work and teaches human resources management at York University in Toronto, employers have started using biometrics in the workplace for a number of reasons.
She says employers argue it’s more convenient, as people most often don’t forget their finger or thumb at home, like one might forget a swipe card. She also says employees have started using fingerprint scans for a punch clock because they say it is more accurate.
They want to know exactly when someone punches in and be confident no one else is doing it for them.”
Indeed, a person could steal your password, but it’s much harder to steal your finger, your face, your iris, or any other part of your body.
Is Biometric Identification an Invasion of Privacy?
Drost notes, however, that there is often push-back to these biometric recognition programs. He writes of people in some organizations revolting against fingerprint-based time clocks. Some people feel it is an invasion of privacy, and they don’t want their employer to have access to such intimate information about them.
The Convenience and Ease of Biometric Tracking
Still, I have to say, I don’t care! Anything that makes life easier, I say to myself. I would almost get a microchip implanted with my debit card number if it meant I never had to wait in another line at a store and could have all the items I put in a digital shopping cart tracked and then be charged for it all as I exited.
I never experienced biometric tracking myself, so maybe I don’t know how it would feel if it happened to me. However, I do love tracking that has nothing to do with remembering to record and provide information.
For example, I have experienced tracking of hours spent in an office via swipe card usage and usage of the office’s Wi-Fi. The company could track which employees’ computers had connected to the office’s Internet, and how often that connection was made.
In fact, I suspect I even have been tracked via use of my computer at home. Whenever an employee logs into their computer, their organization knows—if it wants to know. The same goes for work on a Website. An administrator can easily see who has logged into the content management system, how long, and on what days, they worked.
I see all these objective ways of tracking my work as an advantage because without having to plead my case, or work to prove it, there is easy-to-access evidence that I sometimes must work at night and on the weekends.
In the case of an organization tracking how often an employee enters an office, the advantage is the ability to give credit for participating in back-to-the-office initiatives and the awarding of commuter subsidies to compensate the employee for the expense of mass transportation or gasoline.
The Creepiness Factor
Being tracked can be creepy when the wrong people or organization is doing it. The question is whether your employees see your organization as the wrong people. Biometric tracking requires a level of trust that many organization’s employees don’t feel.
Do you use biometric tracking in your office(s) to monitor the hours employees work and how they use company resources?
