New and Very Easy Technology to Stop the Spread of the Virus: Go Contactless Facility Managers are fighting a war with a virus on ground zero. The first step to fight the virus at the workplace is to reduce the human touchpoints in the workplace

Pandemic proof office space is the "new normal" while we prepare to go to work. Hygiene and workplace safety has to be the soul of workplace design. As India gradually reopens her economy, the time is coming for us to ditch the beds and comfy home couch to prepare for going back to offices. To surge the employee confidence and shun the fears, the employers have to adopt an approach that reduces the "human touch" at offices. The absence of vaccines has posed an even more interesting challenge for facility managers and HRs to start the "new change" to stop the spread.

Who's going to be held liable if an employee gets sick at the workplace? Working with the common flu was very common but the modern workforce due to pandemic is now more aware and sensitive about health hygiene at the workplace to reduce the health risks. Amid Coronavirus there have been a lot of solutions that came in for the rescue of facility managers but looking at the uncertain times, no management is willing to invest in solutions that would be considered ineffective in the coming few months.

Many research has shown that the virus spreads through infected human touch. Can we avoid the human touch at a social place like in an office? If not, then how can we stop the spread of viruses and bacterias at workplaces? Remember the majority of the workforce commute to work from a public transportation system and they don't know if the passenger next to them is infected. This can even pose a greater threat to the health of employees in an office setup.

Going Contactless

Facility Managers are fighting a war with virus on ground zero. The first step to fight the virus at the workplace is to reduce the human touchpoints in the workplace. This starts with replacing touch-based attendance and access control systems with non-touch contactless attendance and access control systems. Remember one infected employee can infect an entire office in a matter of a few hours while we can't blame her but we have to adopt certain tools that can bring back happiness at the workplace.

Designed and Made in India Workplace Innovation

The recent martyrdom of Indian Soldiers of 16, Bihar regiment during India-China conflict has fumed the anger in every Indian. Hence the demand is rising for Designed and Made in Indian non-contact attendance systems. The people of India want to be atmnibhar and they have started replacing the Chinese attendance system at the workplace with the Indian non-contact attendance system. You don't want employees to be unhappy when they mark attendance from a Chinese attendance system. This will cause a social crisis in your office.

Many Chinese manufacturers claim they are making in India but ultimate profits go to China. Moreover, manufacturing is the second phase of product development, the first phase is to design the electronics product. If a product is not designed, manufacturing can never be done. Hence, Indian offices have to adopt designed in India and made in India office attendance systems that are password protected to protect the interest of India.

Privacy a Fundamental Human Rights

Many solutions have come up that identifies employees by their faces. The Facial Biometric system is a privacy nightmare and lacks any legal framework. Lack of a legal framework for facial biometric systems would mean that your right to privacy which is a fundamental right granted by the constitution of India will be compromised. San Francisco has banned Facial Recognition, European Union is debating banning facial recognition for up to 5 years.

Employees never like being tracked. The face is so personal and with facial biometrics it will get worse, lowering the productivity at the workplace. Do you share passwords with people? Then why would you share your face? Think about it and you will realize that if hacked you can never reset your face. The UK police, banks and defence firms had a breach of Facial and Finger biometric data last year with 10 billion people's data accessible to the public.

You can't compromise employee privacy on the pretext of making the office contactless. Even if the facial biometric systems are bought and put to work for attendance all these machines come from China and hence that would help China flourish and prosper more.

You need to think about keeping privacy at the core of a contactless attendance system because privacy is a fundamental human right.