Employee’s time in the office/production floor is one of the most important and most basic performance measurement metrics. Gone are the days of signing in and out of a register and the consequential manual calculation of the number of hours spent on a typical working day. With sophisticated biometric systems, employee’s presence can be captured in real time adding more to the authenticity. Many metrics can be designed to give more accurate time readings of the employees, which in other words is the measure of the employee’s productivity.

Different time metrics to consider:

Based on your requirement, you can design the time metrics to capture the times of your employees. Your requirement also impacts the number of biometric sensors required. So, there is a cost element associated. Hence, you should be careful about your needs. The simplest of them all is biometric in and out times. More complicated metric is the effective work/production time.

1. Biometric In and Out Times:

For this simple time metric, you need to place the biometric sensor in the main door leading to various office spaces and cabins. The employees swipe-in while entering and swipe-out while exiting. This metric confirm two things, viz., attendance of the actual employee without any proxies and duration the employee spent in the office. This metric although sufficient, doesn’t capture employee’s break times (food breaks, bio breaks, regular breaks). So, this can’t be an accurate productivity projection.

2. Effective work/production time:

For this more complicated metric, you will need to place the biometric sensors in the main door leading to various office spaces and cabins and another one in the entrance of the resting area which contains the restrooms, dining room, kitchen/pantry, etc. Also, we have assumed that the resting area is isolated yet within the main office floor, i.e., within the space that has the first biometric sensor. With time captured in two biometric sensors, you can know the effective time the employees have spent in the work/production floor which will subtract the time spent in the resting area. Hence, this metric will give information about three parameters, viz., attendance of the actual employee without any proxies, duration of the employee spent in the work/production floor, duration of the employee spent in the resting area and the effective time which is the difference of the former and latter time captures. Hence this metric is the more accurate projection of the employee productivity.

Similarly, based on these two metrics, you can develop more accurate time captures. Ideally, the best metric is the effective work/production time because it strikes a balance between employee productivity and positive employee engagement.

So, based on your measurement accuracy requirements you can measure the employee productivity. Although this is not conclusive of the actual productivity, it still gives you grounds either to appreciate or enforce corrective actions on your employees. Both of these instances will increase the overall employee engagement, hence their productivity and finally the organization’s revenue and other non-financial goals.