By Faten Omar

KUWAIT: Kuwait's streets were congested again with the return of half a million students back to school for the second semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. The hashtag 'flexible_fingerprint_attendance' trended on Twitter, where citizens complained about traffic jams in various areas. To fix the traffic crisis, many solutions have been suggested, including "flexible fingerprint attendance", which allows employees to have flexible working hours, ensuring their entry and exit from work smoothly, without failing to perform the job tasks assigned to them.

Secretary of the Transparency Society Asrar Hayat tweeted: "With every start of the school year, we face the same congested streets and are unable to find solutions to traffic jams. We were also unable to significantly develop the streets and the public transport system, and still have not applied the flexible fingerprint attendance."

Attorney Mohamed Bou Abbas suggested having morning and evening shifts for all ministries. "Every employee should have a work period that must be decided by the department's head. Each employee can choose any time, but can only change this timing after two years. The working hours for the morning shift must be from 9 am to 1 pm, and the evening shift from 3 pm to 8 pm," he said.

Alia Al-Ali tweeted the flexible work system will contribute to raising the level of employee happiness, improving the work environment, increasing employee productivity, reducing the need for overtime and reducing delays and permissions.

Shaikha Al-Musallam said applying flexible fingerprint attendance and raising salaries will change the productivity of employees and everyone will benefit. "Also, parents will be able to spend more time with their children, while the problem of over-employment will be solved because many parents hire drivers for their children. But when they are free, they will drop them off to school. In addition, citizens will respect the government more," she said.

Muhammad Al-Nama is against the flexible fingerprint attendance, explaining this system will make employees lazy and less productive. For Hamad Al-Saadoun, the system will be a huge help, especially since many employees fail in the annual evolution by more than 30 percent because they are late, noting that people are denied privileges because of this.

In October, the Civil Service Commission had put forward many options to resolve traffic congestions, saying these options are still subject to study and evaluation, including studying the possibility of giving governmental ministries the green light to apply the flexible fingerprint attendance for their employees.