Things are getting faster day by day. Technology has increased the speed of information, communication, and virtually everything we do. Click a button and you are speaking in a webinar of 200 people scattered around the globe. People expect things to work in fractions of a second.

At the same time, it does feel that a whole new source of friction comes from that same very innovation and the myriad of new corporate tools emerging. And that friction is greatly brought by a strong need for security in the corporate world, the recurring theme that you need a compromise between efficiency and security.

But is that the case? Or can you remove that friction from the workforce and let them focus on what they do best, while increasing security? Sorry for the spoiler but, in fact, you can. With biometric authentication. Not sure how? Just keep reading.

👉 Short on time? Check the key takeaways and benefits at the end.

Biometric authentication in the workplace

In this in-depth article, we bring you 7 ways to remove friction in the workplace with biometric face authentication, by enabling fast authentication processes that save your employees time and make them love their job, while decreasing support hours from your IT teams and minimizing security breaches. And for the record, speed to market is key in all industries and the rate at which each company innovates is the new intellectual property right. An increase of 5% in productivity might just well be what can make or break a business. So, are you coping with competition

Everyday, it's a gettin' faster. Goin' faster than a roller coaster-- Buddy Holly

1. Simplify access to corporate tools

Passwords are broken. All of us have numerous online accounts, cards, codes, and passwords to memorize. The IT world expects human beings to each memorize over 200 passwords, somehow random and completely different from each other, making use of lower and upper case letters, digits, symbols, and you are not even allowed to write them down in some computer note for "security reasons". In the end, people just pick one or two master passwords and create variants of those for all other applications creating a honeypot for attackers. Not to mention that these master passwords are most of the time easy to guess. In making passwords perfect for computers, humanity has made them unmanageable for humans and, ultimately, both a convenience and a security nightmare. The worst of both worlds.

The future is passwordless and your face holds the key. The reality is that biometric face authentication can enable a passwordless environment by providing a secure single sign-on. Whichever device you are using, whenever you need to sign-up or sign-in, your face can act as the only password you will ever need. Most of the major corporate tools, be it ERPs, CRMs, online SaaS tools, use underlying authentication protocols that are compatible with Open ID and, as we've seen before, you can bring Open ID and Face Authentication together to streamline the login experience with passwordless single sign-on.

In short, passwords are broken but face authentication enables a passwordless workplace, increasing productivity, while reducing IT support hours and giving peace of mind to your legal team on all security breach ramifications that can come from weaker passwords.

2. Keep it frictionless even in high-security environments

Second factor authentication is currently a usability nightmare. While sometimes risk management imposes additional authentication checks to reduce fraud, there is currently a daunting number of security measures which are a usability nightmare, including second factor authentication with SMS codes sent to phone or special USB sticks you need to carry around. We know how carrying a USB cryptographic code generator makes you look like a cool secret agent but, after a week using it, anyone will agree that the additional security gained falls short of the major inconvenience of misplacing such critical and small piece of hardware.

Adding face to an authentication flow enables great experiences and increases security. The truth is that it is super easy to achieve Secure Customer Authentication combining face authentication, mobile device possession and proximity as part a of a holistic Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) strategy. This enables amazing fluid user experiences that everyone loves while increasing security. And this can be done for every single industry, including the Digital Workplace. Read more on how to achieve this on our earlier article on how you can leverage face-based MFA solutions to get frictionless user authentication while increasing your business security.

Overall, current second-factor authentication is very inconvenient, but face authentication allows implementation of multi-factor workflows that do not rely on additional physical hardware or clumsy codes, providing amazing experience, while increasing security levels

3. Know your employee at every transaction

Do you really know who is accessing your systems? With the immense increase in remote work, it is now commonplace to have a global workforce with colleagues that have worked for months, sometimes years, in our close team and whom we have never seen in person. While global remote work companies help businesses hire globally and support screening processes, it is still a challenge to make sure the documents provided by employees around the world indeed belong to the person that we end up working with daily. And with passwords, cards, and codes, it is impossible to know that the person using the right credentials is in fact who they should be.

All the screening process employees go through would mean nothing if someone else could use their credentials. But with face authentication you can verify that on each transaction.

Face enables Knowing Your Employees at every transaction. Just as with checking-in to a hotel, face authentication can support the identity verification process and ensure the onboarded face corresponds to the right identity. Furthermore, as the authentication is done using a face, you can be sure every single transaction taking place, any corporate access, any approval — be it passwordless, MFA, or even physical — matches the official identity of the person that was hired and onboarded in the first place.

Only then can you have peace of mind that the person accessing all your information and systems is indeed who they claim to be.

In summary, just as with KYC in banking, KYE (Know Your Employee) in the Digital Workplace is highly beneficial from a compliance and security perspective. Plus, as you perform it, you can be sure who the person accessing tools and systems really is, on every single transaction, no access cards or codes being passed around.

4. Physical access and office life with a simple look

The hybrid work model is gaining traction. While people want the advantages of working remotely, they also want the option of occasionally coming to the office and interacting with the team. And even when working remotely, many people still get out of the house and use shared office spaces several days per week.

Office authentication has never been employee centric. From having to use a mix of physical cards for access, paying at the canteen and buying from a vending machine in coins, to your customers and visitors having to go through a long registration process with security to get their access card, the employee journey for authentication is fully broken. This leads to unwanted costs for recovering access and valuable employee time wasted.

Biometric authentication provides one solution for all office authentication use cases. In fact, all usages of a company ID card, a payment method, or some function-specific card, can be replaced by one single token: the face. Entering the building, special reserved areas, paying for lunch, or grabbing a drink from the vending machine can be done with a simple look. And permissions can be given on the spot. So, if you have a visitor coming in, by adding a simple link to their calendar invite, you can allow them to onboard via selfie and be authenticated as they arrive to your office with the right access permissions for a certain time window.

In a nutshell, physical offices are here to stay and face can replace any corporate card or payment method, so both employees and visitors can flow around corporate spaces according to defined permissions or get food and drinks, with a simple look.

5. Swift ID verification processes while traveling

When traveling, the office is everywhere. For many, their office is a plane, or an airport, or a hotel. Business travelers require transaction efficiency at every single touchpoint. Checking-in to a hotel, entering breakfast lounges, connecting to the Wi-Fi, entering large venues for events, should happen in seconds, not minutes. Queuing is simply not acceptable, nor wasting productive hours after travel to sort paperwork.

Now, instead of centering the processes on hotels, conferences or transport operators, travel interactions should be centered on travelers. It is not for the traveler to know what the process is in each hotel, venue or car rental. It is for each of them to adhere to efficient standard ways of verifying ID and providing access.

Provide your employees with a Digital Identity. As more and more such venues adopt digital identities as a vehicle to get access and pay, it is up for the businesses to choose those more efficient venues and then to make it a reality for their own employees. In other words, as part of their set of their corporate credentials, employees can get a digital ID that supports their efficient identification while traveling. Then, as showcased earlier in our article On-line check-in that just works, they can just check-in to a hotel in seconds with a simple look.

Overall, to make travel more efficient and productive during and after journeys, companies can ensure they prioritize venues where swift digital ID processes are in place and ensure their employees have a digital identity which they can use with a simple look.

To wrap up

Biometric face authentication allows companies to increase employee's productivity and become a great place to work. It saves employees on average 20 minutes every single day on recovering access, re-authenticating, switching context, internal processes. They will love their employee experience and will recommend it, enabling your company to reach larger and better talent pools. Just imagine the amazing degree of efficiency and personalization of the end-to-end digital workplace journey in a "do anything with a look" world. No passwords, no cards, just people.

In addition to great employee experience and increased productivity, automating the above processes brings privacy and security to a whole new level. Just think about the security and liability ramifications involved with weak passwords or, in parallel, the costs of the IT help desk on recovering passwords or granting access to new users. All those become a thing of the past.

In summary, whether you hadn't come across the possibility of using face authentication to create frictionless employee experiences or weren't sure if it would come at the cost of security, our recommendation is that you should certainly consider it, as cost savings and increased productivity are significant and potential costs originating from security risks are decreased.

Key takeaways

• Biometric face authentication enables a passwordless workplace, increasing productivity, while reducing IT support hours and giving peace of mind to your legal team.
• Biometric face authentication enables multi-factor workflows that do not rely on additional physical hardware or clumsy codes, providing amazing experience, while increasing security levels.
• KYE (Know Your Employee) in the Digital Workplace is highly beneficial from a compliance and security perspective. Combined with face authentication, you can be sure who the person accessing tools and systems really is, on every single transaction.
• Biometric face authentication can replace any corporate card or payment method onsite, so both employees and visitors can flow around corporate spaces according to defined permissions or get food and drinks with a simple look.
• Swift digital ID processes can make business travel a breeze during and after journeys, if employers choose venues which use them and ensure their employees have a digital identity which they can use with a simple look.

What's in it for you

By implementing these processes, your company can:

• Save an average of 20 minutes per working day per employee, increasing productivity.
• Reduce security and compliance associated risks and costs.
• Become a great place to work in and reach richer talent pools.

How can you offer these features to your guests?

Youverse provides most of the face authentication solutions described above and would love to bring them to your company. At Youverse we think that seeing is believing. And because we trust so much in the quality of our products, we make it possible for anyone to integrate and test our solutions in minutes.

If you're a technical leader or developer, to start integrating and testing, just register and subscribe a free plan. Feel free to get help on our discord channel or get in touch directly with our support team.

If you're a business leader or decision-maker and want to know more about how to offer online check-in that just works, send us a message or feel free to book a meeting with our team of specialists, who will be happy to help.

You can also browse our pages to learn more about our Hospitality, Banking, Web3, Retail, and Digital Workplace solutions.