You can always find people to guide you
Scrupulous ones suffering because of unscrupulous
Recently, the way attendance is recorded has changed in our office. Before the new system was introduced, you could punch from anywhere: you didn’t have to be present in the office premises to register your punch, but now our attendance is geo-tagged. Unless you are in the office premises or near it, you can’t punch.
I work for a newspaper, and some employees don’t have a definite time to punch in or out as they are reporters. They go out reporting or have to meet their sources and don’t have a fixed schedule.
The flexibility regarding punch timing and location in the earlier system was allowed, keeping the erratic schedule of the reporters.
Discontent
But now, since people need to be present in the office before they can punch, it has created chaos. Many reporters have expressed their dissatisfaction with the new attendance system to the H.R.
It feels like a big brother is constantly watching over the employees: where they are and what they are doing. The new attendance system has rubbed employees the wrong way.
From a reporter’s perspective, the new system makes punching in and out a tall task, annoyingly complicated.
Why new system?
But the other side to this is what HR says: many employees rarely showed up in the office and punched from wherever they wanted.
They would be on vacation or sitting at home and marking attendance, with the management having no way to track where they are. Have they gone to the meeting they said they had?
As often is the case, it wasn’t that everyone was unscrupulous about marking attendance in the old system. Some were punching in even when not working or idling at home, but most were meeting sources or out reporting because they couldn’t be in the office.
Scrupulous suffering
But as often the case is scrupulous ones suffer because of unscrupulous ones.
Many laws become onerous and a hassle for people because the law was designed, keeping in mind how people can break it or evade the clutches of law, and there will always be people who would misuse the room given to accommodate the nature of work or a particular circumstance because that’s what human nature isn’t it?
Hope
If everyone did what they should, this world would become a much better place to live, but it isn’t. Having said that, I also see people around me who play by the rules and only in exceptional cases do they fall short of the rules.
These people still give me hope that the world can improve and guide me on what to do when I am in a predicament or get me back on track when I have the temptation to go off the rail.
