Time Data Systems – June 2021 Newsletter

At the time of writing this article, it is estimated that just over 53% of the US population has received at least one dose of the two-dose COVID-19 vaccines, and 45% are fully vaccinated. The daily reported statistics for new positive test results in our country have declined sharply in the past month, falling 43%. While we are still encouraged to practice social distancing and attentive hand hygiene, it’s clear the pandemic – and it’s grip on America – is abating. We are all eager for our lives to return to at least most of the normalcy we knew when we rang in 2020, but how do Americans feel about returning to work?

Harris Poll conducted a survey in mid-May 2021 about this topic, and relayed the results to USA Today. The study revealed several key insights that we thought were important to share, as the country continues to re-open, and there are numerous thought-provoking questions and decisions you’ll need to make about how your workforce will do their jobs moving forward. Continue to read below to learn what the respondents shared.

Current work arrangements for the adults questioned include:

• 32% – Working from home all the time still
• 21% – Go to the office sometimes
• 19% – Back in their office full-time
• 27% – Never did work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic

If the individual could choose where they do their work:

• 40% would work remotely or from home permanently
• 35% would prefer a mix of working remotely and in the office
• Just 25% would elect to work in the office permanently

The results were interesting when poll participants were asked when they believed all workers at their company would return to the office full-time, being fairly close in almost all given options for their possible answer. Between 13%-19% of those asked chose either within a number of months (1, 1-3, or 4-6) or by the end of 2021. Four figures from this specific question really stood out though.

• 16% – Didn’t know when
• 9% – Not until 2022
• 4% – When the employees want to come back
• 6% – The company is becoming fully remote (meaning not returning to their pre-pandemic office location at all)

Regarding concerns about returning full-time to their offices, the respondents were basically evenly split between whichever ones listed from which they could choose. Just 9% indicated no concerns.

• Most chosen overall: Losing the flexibility gained while working from home
• Specific Concerns Related to COVID-19 and Health
  • Most chosen: Being around people again
  • 2^nd most chosen: Possibly being around unvaccinated people
  • 3^rd most chosen: Social distancing protocols being abandoned
  • 4^th most chosen: Sharing spaces and appliances with others
  • 5^th most chosen: Going to in-person meetings

• Anxieties or Worries Unrelated to COVID-19 or Health
  • Most chosen: Leery of having to engage in small talk
  • 2nd most chosen: Getting back into their pre-pandemic routine
  • 3rd most chosen: Fear of having forgotten their socialization skills
  • 4th most chosen: Needing to travel for work
  • 5th most chosen: Productivity decreasing from their lockdown levels
  • 6th most chosen: Not being as articulate as they were before lockdown

Organizations are anxious to get back to full capacity as soon as possible, and for certain types of businesses and industries, that will mean workforces must be back at physical, brick-and-mortar locations for at least some period of time during the workday or workweek. This also helps reinstate and reinforce a company’s culture. While this is certainly an understandable position for companies to take, they need to keep in mind the tight labor market and stay abreast of the latest news on the current shortage of workers to fill open positions. Also, they must now realize that people have shown they can be effective in their jobs outside of an office environment, and for a great many, the arrangement is now their preference.

Options available which may remedy these challenges – or at least balance the opposing forces – are businesses accepting the fact that they may lose staff and will need to figure out a way to replace those who leave; and offering flextime, allowing remote working permanently, and compromising to accommodate what has been a way of life for their workers for almost 16 months.

Another shockingly simple option can be stated in just a single 3-letter word – ASK. 47% of participants in the May 2021 Harris Poll revealed that the organizations they work for have not even had a discussion or opened a dialogue with employees about their concerns with going back to work in their offices full-time, much less their level of interest in doing so. There are many takeaways for businesses as a result of the survey, and perhaps the most important one is the need to communicate with their valued workforce about moving forward together after the COVID-19 pandemic.

1960s Furtive Facial Recognition Research

Biometrics measures physical features such as fingerprints, iris patterns, characteristics of the face (facial recognition), and more to identify someone. Its use has been gaining traction for approximately the past ten years in high-tech devices and certain industries, but many of us probably remember decades-old offerings from Hollywood that showed characters using biometrics. We’ll save those trivia nuggets for another time (so be on the lookout for our future newsletters), and share with you today the non-Hollywood, nearly six-decades-old origin story of the development of facial recognition.

The 1960s saw 3 science and technology pioneers come up with the basis of today’s facial recognition. Funding for their research was from an undisclosed intelligence agency, which explains why a great deal of their work and what they gleaned has never been made public. From what we’ve been able to learn, all of them were with Palo Alto’s Panoramic Research when the bulk of their project (called “man-machine”) was ongoing, mostly in 1964 and 1965.

Helen Chan Wolf and Charles Bisson were mostly involved in researching the ability of programming computers of the era to recognize faces of human beings. We found precious less-than-few further details about how they went about doing so, and nothing when it came to what they learned. Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe, is referred to by some as the father of this particular technology, a founder by anyone who has studied it, and the nickname “Woody”.

Born in Oklahoma, his other credits include computer scientist, prominent educator, and mathematician. His system didn’t use a computer to recognize faces, but instead a system with a RAND tablet and manually-entered coordinates corresponding to facial features that were mapped on the grid using a stylus. The pen-like tool sent out electromagnetic pulses so the “roadmaps” of faces could be recorded and entered into a database. When a new photograph of a person was entered into the system, the databank was analyzed and a previous entry most matching the new likeness was retrieved. Unfortunately, Bledsoe succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease on October 4, 1995, and wouldn’t live to see the technology he pioneered put into the smartphones and other devices we have today, and, therefore, not its widespread use either.