COVID-19: Restart after lockdown with touchless attendance technology

The Coronavirus scare led to the suspension of Biometric attendance system in offices of Delhi Govt from March 6 2020 followed by offices of Government of India, Sports Authority of India, NGT thus forcing private & public companies to follow suit.

Rachel Graham an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina concluded that the life span of Coronavirus is “few hours to few days”. As per the research published in the Journal of hospital infection, Coronavirus can stay for upto 5 days on metal, plastic and ceramic surfaces.

Is it really about Coronavirus or rather we should worry about the spread of viruses in offices in general? Offices are the hotbeds for the growth of bacterias and viruses thus infecting entire offices within a short span of time.

How does the virus spread in offices?
Imagine a day in the life of your colleague. Your colleague travels either in the bus, metro, and other modes of public transportation, and shares space with a co-passenger that sneeze, cough openly and this same co-passenger touches the handles of the public transport, your employee touches the same handle then touches face without washing hands and gets infected unfortunately and unknowingly.

She comes to the office getting infected, sneezes and touches the biometric attendance system. Now all employees in the office touch the infected biometric machine and within a few hours the entire office is infected. You bring back this infection home and infect the members of your family.

However, unfortunately it was spread of coronavirus or rather lack of Covid-19 vaccination that scared the authorities to direct the suspension of biometric attendance to stop the spread, that otherwise would have been lethal. I would say it is a welcome move, well intentional and came at the right time because precaution is better than cure.

Office Post Lockdown
As India approaches a staggered lockdown exit, India Inc. expects to get back to work with a delusion in mind as to how HR’s would administrate attendance in offices? And how would employees react to start using biometric attendance? Any infected surface can cause the spread of virus and employees will be more alarmed and demanding to replace the biometric attendance system with a contact less attendance system that can stop the spread of virus in offices.

Hit Restart
Attendance system is the first point of contact for every employee. Thus the containment of spread of virus is at the doorstep of your office. The future of work and office hygiene would require the termination of the biometric attendance system as employees would be scared to touch the biometric machines.

Hence HR’s have to now restart the attendance system after lockdown is over, that shall not be very challenging if HR chooses a touchless attendance system that in fact is

designed in India, Made in India by Indians. However, every management and employer has to clearly understand that this time the attendance system shall not take away the identity of employees. Face and Iris are the ONLY identities of an employee, recognizing an employee by recording the face breaches the privacy of the employees as in India there are no defined laws to ensure the legal action in case of loss of facial data. In the UK alone, facial and finger biometric data of 1 million people was exposed on the public domain.

The Right Approach
So, forget everything that’s biometric. HR’s and employers should deploy a corona proof contactless non-human touch made in India attendance system as a precautionary step to stop the spread of virus as employees return to buildings.

How about your Phone becoming your access card? Your employee taps the phone on the attendance machine entirely made by Indian Entrepreneur, Engineers and Scientist and all the logs are available to you on the cloud dashboard with TLS 2048 bits security.

Such a connected devices non touch attendance system while making a phone an access card eliminates plastic access cards on one hand, it also ensures the containment of spread of viruses in office on the other hand.

Purchasing infection proof non-biometric attendance machines that’s touchless is my suggestion for a hygienic, healthier and more productive workplace.

Authored by Diksha Deo, Founder & CEO, INCUBSENCE