MADINAH — The municipality announced it has started holding its employees accountable for failing to comply with the five daily fingerprints system on Tuesday, Al-Watan reported. Madinah Mayor Muhammad Al-Amri said the decision to have employees register their fingerprint five times a day was taken to ensure punctuality and productivity in the workplace. "A delay of half an hour to an hour from registering the fingerprint will lead to consequences if the delays add up to more than 10 hours a month. There are still employees who are resentful of the decision and prefer to only sign in and out, having only two fingerprint registrations a day," said Al-Amri. He added the first fingerprinting will be done at the time of arrival at the work place, the second will be carried out between 9 a.m. and 9.30 a.m., the third between 10.30 a.m. and 11.00 a.m., the fourth between 11.45 a.m. and 12.15 p.m. and the last one while leaving the office after completing working hours. "The rate of employee attendance has risen the past week to 55.5 percent after implementing the new fingerprints system. The rate of employee attendance during the first day of the past week was 38 percent. On the second day it has increased to 42 percent. On the third day it has increased to 46 percent. On the third day of the week the rate of employee attendance reached 52 percent," said Al-Amri. He added his decision was met with great objection from the employees. "The employees protested in the office and expressed their objection on social media. I had to reveal that the rate of employee absence reached 72 percent. The absentees caused 114,000 tasks to be delayed and unaccomplished," said Al-Amri. He added some of employees would get out of the office after fingerprinting and come back late, thus affecting the department's services to citizens and residents. "We have around 2,300 employees. The new mechanism will enable authorities to follow up activities of workers three times a day and make sure of their presence at work place. We have adopted various methods in the past to ensure work discipline and we have found the new mechanism as the most ideal and effective," Al-Amri said. He also said that implementing the new fingerprint system is within the capacity of his authority. "I aim to increase the attendance rate to 90 percent. The new system will increase the efficiency of the workflow and the civilians requests and paperwork will be processed as it should. Any failure to comply with the system will reflect on the employees' salary," said Al-Amri. A citizen said the new fingerprint system has made employees of the municipality more punctual. "The change in the municipality's efficiency was evident last week. I wish the same system would be applied to all government directorates," said the citizen.
