Business Services, Technology

Keep Your Employees Honest with a Fingerprint Clock System

Written by: Allied Time

Switching from your old time logging system to fingerprint time clocks can have quite a few benefits for your business. A properly set up system will be quicker, more accurate, and save you money compared to manually stamped time cards. There are a few things you should know before switching.

The dishonest practice of abusing the time clock by clocking in for a friend who is running late, also known as buddy punching, could be lowering your production and costing you money. It also makes it harder to notice an employee who is diligently clocking in on time every day and working late to help meet deadlines.  However, since their actual presence is needed for a fingerprint with a biometric system, employees are not able to clock in for each other.

Additionally, rounding hours to the nearest few minutes when clocking in and out is imprecise and can make it difficult to accurately tell if someone has a problem with being tardy. A biometric employee time clock can take the exact time that someone clocks in or out and makes it much easier to see who the problem and star employees are.

Some of your employees may be concerned about the security of the system since it scans their fingerprint. However, there is little for them to be afraid of here. Most fingerprint clocking systems do not store an exact copy of your employees fingerprint, and would not work if it had to be able to process hundreds of thousands of different people. Rather, they work by converting several key elements of a fingerprint into a string of numbers. The system searches the scanned fingerprint for a matching string, and after finding one the scan is deleted from the memory. Since only strings related to the key elements are stored in the memory, were someone to access the data they would not be able to recreate an exact copy of any employees print.

Keep in mind that there may be other concerns that pop up, and it may be useful to discuss the pros and cons of switching to a new system with your employees before you actually commit to the change. Knowing about the change beforehand, and discussing how it will affect everyone, could even help switching to be more accepted and foster a greater trust between your team and their managers.