The trend towards finger scanners, the digital equivalent of the 20th century punch clock, is growing across industries and occupational groups in the UAE. The idea of capturing accurate data on employee attendance through the use of finger scanners seems, on the surface, to be a reasonable and uncontentious development.
Any technological advance that enables good management is a boon to business, but no technological advance is a substitute for good people management skills. Tracking employee arrival and departure offers benefits to managing workplace attendance and is particularly useful for work that is largely routine, process-orientated and time- and location-bound. However, the innovative, knowledge-driven work environment is often not time- and location-bound and requires a flexibility that managers in the UAE may lack the skills to deal with.
If you have identified performance problems in your workplace, finger scanners are unlikely to solve these problems. Requiring workers to scan in helps ensure their presence in the workplace, but not their productivity. And even their presence is not guaranteed by timekeeping technology. As an example, several years ago I worked with a colleague whose job category required her to scan in and out every day. This employee lived close to her place of work and would occasionally come to work, just to scan in, and then leave again for several hours, only returning if called upon.
The employee didn’t lack motivation, and no time control system could improve her productivity. Her behaviour was essentially a management failure. She was able to frequently abscond from her duties because her duties were not clearly defined. A punch-clock or scanner cannot substitute for any of those things. From many of the executives I have spoken with about the implementation of scanners, a driving force behind their adoption seems to be an unwillingness among senior staff to manage people directly. Many managers experience difficulties with the performance of an employee or group of employees. One of the performance elements might be poor attendance. Scanners are then seen as a way to control and improve this issue without having to directly address broader performance problems with subordinates. Essentially, it is a tool that helps managers avoid having a difficult conversation with their underperforming employees.
The UAE is a high-context culture that prefers low conflict interpersonal relations. This might be a contributing factor to why managers are reluctant to engage in direct discussions with underperforming subordinates, but if we want to be competitive among the knowledge economies of the a globalised world these are discussion that need to take place.
It might be easy to turn the blame for poor performance on the managers in question, but in reality many of them are also in a difficult position. The traditions of bureaucratic management that are prevalent in the region often mean that managers might be responsible for their subordinates, but in reality have very little authority to reward or punish employees and so cannot strongly influence workplace behaviours.
A more unfortunate by-product of punch clocks and scanners is that they may not only fail to solve the intended performance issues of underperformers, they may in fact have a damaging effect on existing workplace cultures. In a diversified knowledge economy with high proportions of vocational and liberal professions, the nine-to-five work day is largely a myth. Such professionals are regularly working at varying hours of the night and day to best suit their productivity levels, deadlines, international collaborations and customer requirements. By imposing a workplace requirement for attendance, an organisation may be inadvertently creating a punch-clock mentality.
When working professionals feel denied the responsibility and flexibility to manage how they achieve their goals, they might rebel against such inflexibilities by withdrawing any good will to supporting the organisation outside of the work hours they are expected to clock-in for. Any requirement for work outside of the nine-to-five day is resisted or refused. Before implementing new scanning technologies in your workplace think carefully about what you are hoping to achieve with this new technology and if technology is the best way to achieve it.
James Ryan is an associate professor of organisational behaviour and HR at UAE University
