Attendance Woes

Maintaining a strict discipline in attendance by the employees must have been a headache for the organization. The trouble was that the administrative seniors make decisions only because they are seniors, not necessarily experts. So class III and IV employees are marked present or absent at a central place by a fellow called time-keeper. The attendance at the actual place of work is immaterial. So people marked present get salary whether they actually work or not. I once read in the newspaper that in some places the time-keeper equivalent marks them present for a fee (like 50%) of the salary, and the employees actually remain totally away from the workplace and get full salary. I had suggested that the time-keeper should continue to mark their attendance, so that he can send substitutes at places where the employees do not turn up for work. But the place of work should have a person marking their attendance for work, so that an effective report can be sent to cross check with the time-keeper's report. I don't think such a simple solution must not have occurred to the biggies in the administration. But they had never tried to do it. When I made this suggestion to the chief a few years ago, the response was 'no response'. I wondered if she was afraid of the workers' unions. Or perhaps she did not want to become unpopular with many people. After all, this post was a just another stepping stone, to be treated as such, not for achieving anything useful while the foot was on the stone. Now the biggies at the main office want to keep up with the modern times and eliminate human factor in all this mismanagement. So they first tried swiping cards. The system never worked because the concerned clerical person also was against the idea of having to report on duty on time and work till the end of the duty hours. So the data was never retrieved from the computers, the buffer always remained full, and all new logs were rejected after the first week. The next step was to start biometric attendance system. That will be my next post.