Last week, the Madinah Municipality took an exceptional decision that drew the ire of some of the employees. It decided to enforce mandatory fingerprinting registrations five times every working day for its employees. Madinah Mayor Muhammad Al-Amri told a local newspaper that the new system of five times fingerprinting every working day was a legal measure aimed at ensuring punctuality and productivity. Justifying this move, he said, «It shows our keenness to ensure productivity, offer best services to customers, guarantee occupational justice to staff members, and identify those who are negligent in their duties. He said that some employees of Madinah mayoralty and municipalities were not strictly adhering to their working hours. Some of them get out of the office after fingerprinting and come back late, thus affecting the department's services to citizens and residents. This step of five-time fingerprinting was shocking to the municipality employees and they objected to it. They gathered in the main hall to object and were engaged in a heated discussion with the mayor before he left the hall. As the mayor left the hall the gathered staff booed him off. The mayor argued that the fingerprinting system is aimed at increasing discipline and productivity at work. He also said the new system would identify the slackers and the absentees, who with their poor record give the whole civic body a bad name. He also cited that around 90 of employees are careless and unproductive. Some would describe this move as bold and imaginative to bring order to the department while some would term it is a childish system that concentrates on jailing employees in their offices, or chaining them to their desks against their will. Although it is very important to ensure discipline at work and show respect to office hours, I wish that measures to ensure productivity at work was also discussed rather than just completing the working hours without being productive. For the basic approach of measuring productivity ratio of input/output needs to be fine-tuned for every sector. I would have to say here that fingerprinting five times a day maybe is a little bit too much. What if an employee was busy doing his work and forgot to fingerprint? Or does the employee need to leave his work incomplete just to rush and fingerprint? I think a fingerprinting system at the entrance of the building is more than enough to ensure that the worker is inside. Once inside, there should be another system that ensures the measurements of productivity. Productivity is always the keyword. According to the mayor, around 114,000 paperwork were not completed or left unattended inside the municipality because of the lack of discipline. The backlog of paperwork is attributed to the fact that only 25 percent of the employees are disciplined and showed sincerity at work. With the new system, the mayor said, the level of discipline will increase to 90 percent in one month's time. I do not know if there is any productivity measurement system applied in any government department, because till now I have never heard about it. In fact sometimes when I visit a government department I find some of the employees relaxing in the back or pretending to be busy while very few are serving the large number of people. Although there are no detailed studies of productivity at work, I would like to cite a study that was published two years back about government employees that stated 69 percent of workers in the government sector were absent from work without a valid excuse. It also revealed that 59 percent of workers leave work well before time and 68 percent of workers regularly take three-hour breaks. The study went on to say that 47 percent of supervisors do not monitor the productivity of their employees and the majority of the absentees from work are married. Strictness in implementing the fingerprinting system should go side by side with a system that measures and enforces productivity and monitors it closely. There should also be a system to reward a proactive and productive employee while introducing a series of actions against those who slack and find excuses not to work. What good is a fingerprinting system if an employee completes the working hours while being non-productive or effecting a productivity rate of less than 20 percent. There are many ways to increase productivity at work place and certainly the main one in my opinion is to fire the toxic employees, who are resisting discipline. In my opinion, it is the lazy ones who are spreading negative vibes and are the ones in the forefront objecting to any order in the workplace. Such employees can quickly be replaced with young staff. What is more important is to activate the complaint box system and measure customer feedback. The fact that more than 114,000 paperwork have been delayed in the municipality means only one thing that no one is taking any measure on consumer feedback, or even noting it. It is impossible to believe that none of the people among the 114,000 with delayed paperwork have complained. If they had complained why did no one listen? In a productive environment, a lazy employee fears the most when there are complaints against him, while it is the opposite in an unproductive environment where he feels safe even if there are hundreds of complaints. The unproductive employee knows that he alone would not stand out in the crowd and can carry on with his merry ways with impunity. It is very important that we move toward a productive work environment that measures both time at workplace and productivity. The Vision 2030 has charted out a course for our future, and it is very clear that institutions cannot afford lazy employees anymore. They either shape up or ship out. The writer can be reached at [email protected] Twitter: @anajeddawi_eng
