The VP suspect that many employees with a hybrid 3-day-in-2-day-out arrangements aren't observing it regularly. She asked me to put a sign in sheet on the wall to record their attendance. She might as well give them timecards to punch in and out. We'll have a revolt on our hands.

I'm looking for a more efficient and more importantly, a passive way to record their attendance w/o their involvements to prevent tampering.

Every employees are issued a laptop, and IT has recorded all their MAC addresses. That would be a logical route to take.

Is there a way to detect a laptop when it enters the office and register it in a log?

Of course. But you'll have to ask your IT resource to write the script to pull the data and report on it, with some daily and weekly rollup stats so you won't have to do it yourself on a spreadsheet. For an experienced IT person it would be very easy and quick to put that together and automate it. If your network person gave the data to anyone who likes to mess with data like that using speadsheets it would be equally easy. You can find people like that in any accounting, bookkeeping, HR, and finance departments. Actually these days there are lots of people in all companies who like to do that kind of stuff and are very good at it, and they can be in any department, especially in the skilled trades. These days you can find almost anyone with an interest or experience with mashing data in any company department absolutely. If you can get the data you should be able to get it done with a little work along these lines.

Is there key card access to the parking lot, exterior, or interior doors?

All of these card access systems have software capable of running door reports which log when someone's issued key card activates a door or gate.

Have a locked employee entrance that a badge needs to be scanned to open.

Access control system of card scan activity or have IT run a report as to which laptops are hitting the VPN (if you have one for remote work) versus connecting to the network from an internal access point/LAN connection.

The IT approach would remove any doubts of someone scanning someone else's badge (we have had that before as well).

We thought that the key card or badge access card was a good way to track employees but we quickly learned that we had employees giving their card to other employees and one employee would scan in their card and then wait one or two minutes and scan in their friends card who remained at home that day when they were supposed to be in the office working.

We had to install security cameras to have the needed evidence that the employees were doing this, and we did within two weeks of installing the cameras - and we also installed signs indicating that the cameras were there and in use.

No badge access. Just an old fashioned glass doors that are unlocked during business hours.

We only have 14 employees, 4 of whom are managers, so we just need to track 10 laptops coming into the office. We won't have a massive amount of data to log, so we won't need anything complicated.

What about RFID tags inside the laptop? As thin as a sticker, they can be stuck to the inside of the housing.

Don't nobody know nuthin bout it.

Chip the workers.....................

quote:

I'm looking for a more efficient and more importantly, a passive way to record their attendance w/o their involvements to prevent tampering.

Not sure what your employee job responsibilities are or how you track employee performance. I manage quite a few software engineers (I still write code FYI) and it is easy for me to track their work via GitHub check ins and and code merges. We're also on MS Teams and when I doubt attendance or work product I will give them a Teams call when they are green (available). They better answer. I did find slackards via few and small code check ins and not answering calls. They are gone now.

One other thing you might try is "stand up" meetings on whatever collaboration app you're using (Zoom, Teams, etc). We do the typical around the room input from team members where they state what they're working on and what road blocks they may have. We have about 40 people participate and allow about 1 minute per person. The meeting is usually done in about 20 minutes and have been very beneficial. It's easy to tell who is working and accomplishing via these meetings.

Hope that helps cuz this is a big time problem in some organizations.

What is wrong with requiring a casual head count report by the daily supervisor?
After all they have to be in the office also.

Just get a clock in clock. When they come in they gotta clock in/out like at just about every other company.. you’ll see who’s there and how long for. If they don’t like it then tough shit

quote:

Originally posted by Bytes:

quote:

I'm looking for a more efficient and more importantly, a passive way to record their attendance w/o their involvements to prevent tampering.

Not sure what your employee job responsibilities are or how you track employee performance. I manage quite a few software engineers (I still write code FYI) and it is easy for me to track their work via GitHub check ins and and code merges. We're also on MS Teams and when I doubt attendance or work product I will give them a Teams call when they are green (available). They better answer. I did find slackards via few and small code check ins and not answering calls. They are gone now.

One other thing you might try is "stand up" meetings on whatever collaboration app you're using (Zoom, Teams, etc). We do the typical around the room input from team members where they state what they're working on and what road blocks they may have. We have about 40 people participate and allow about 1 minute per person. The meeting is usually done in about 20 minutes and have been very beneficial. It's easy to tell who is working and accomplishing via these meetings.

Hope that helps cuz this is a big time problem in some organizations.

Bytes is spot on here. He is doing exactly what is done in my shop. With enough scheduled virtual meetings with mandatory attendance assigned to the appropriate personnel, it becomes clear who is productive and following the policies about work locations and deliverables. I work for people like Bytes and their project managers and what he is describing is very effective and doable.

For most people working in any space with computer interaction, the network IS the time clock so to speak. I can't think of any modern work system that needs physical punch card time clocks any longer these days, though I'm sure they are still needed in certain situations.

Old school timecards seem like the easiest cheapest option.

Why the revolt? If they are required to be there then so be it. Why all the secret pain in the ass head counts?

If you have anyone your badge for the purpose of scamming the system to show John came in the building but he was using Sam’s badge, that was a fireable offense the first time. They stressed that every quarterly training

They also have mouse and keystroke and website tracking for people logging onto the VPN remotely. Some buddies in IT have told me crazy stories of inappropriate websites found on company issued laptops.

quote:

Originally posted by limblessbiff:
Just get a clock in clock. When they come in they gotta clock in/out like at just about every other company.. you’ll see who’s there and how long for. If they don’t like it then tough shit

Clock in/out? Is that still a thing?

I haven’t done that for 20+ years at my company.

We get regularly tasked for utilization reports more than attendance and it’s all based on badge readers. Management wants to see how many people assigned to Room XYZ are badging in per week or month or year.

quote:

Originally posted by ElToro:
If you have anyone your badge for the purpose of scamming the system to show John came in the building but he was using Sam’s badge, that was a fireable offense the first time. They stressed that every quarterly training

I don't see how an employee could defend such blatant payroll/attendance fraud.

But with how batshit crazy and entitled people are these days, they'll still try to justify it.

quote:

Originally posted by 83v45magna:
What about RFID tags inside the laptop? As thin as a sticker, they can be stuck to the inside of the housing.

Don't nobody know nuthin bout it.

That's not a bad idea. Just like libraries do to their books nowadays. Too bad we didn't implant them before they were issued. Now we would have to ask to see their laptops for "upgrades".

quote:

Originally posted by gjgalligan:
What is wrong with requiring a casual head count report by the daily supervisor?
After all they have to be in the office also.

I don't see anything wrong with that. Since it was the VP who pulled me aside for this little caper, I wanted to offer a more elegant solution than just having the managers take roll.

Same thing with using Team like Bytes and wrightd suggested. We already spent on average 90mins a day for meetings on Team and in person. Using it to for unscheduled check-ups to hunt for slackers is more time spent on unnecessary meetings. That's why we need a passive way to track them.

quote:

Originally posted by Lord Vaalic:
Old school timecards seem like the easiest cheapest option.

Why the revolt? If they are required to be there then so be it. Why all the secret pain in the ass head counts?

These are all professionals with delicate egos, you see? They won't stand for being treated like they're working in a meat-packing plant. No engineers. Just Sales and Marketing in this office.

I suspect the VP is building a case against someone or a number of people. This is what she plans to use as cause to clean house of the deadwoods. She wants me to come up with a way to do this quietly in the background without alarming anyone, including the managers.

I'll need at least the IT guy's help to set this up. Hope he can keep a secret.

We got a cheap fingerprint thing off amazon.
dispatchers need to clock in with their thumbprint and clock out with their thumbprint.

I'm not a fan of passive anything if there is a real attendance issue. IMHO it should be dealt with head on. Managers should track it directly, and if you have a bad seed get rid of the bad seed.

Every passive system wasn't developed as a time keeping or attendance system. I had a hospital VPs asking me to run parking gate badge swipe reports because they thought their hospitalist bill was a few hundred thousand too high during covid. I thought really, you don't have a better way of tracking your contract Doctors? Parking gates get raised for maintenance or after hours/weekends and they don't swipe in and you think that's the best way to reduce the bill? It's not meant to be an attendance system.