Dealing with the Chronically Late Employee
Change the behavior, not the employee—if you can.
If six guys on the night shift punch in late at the Honda plant, it’s not going to cause the automaker much grief. If employees of a small business decide to sleep in or take a “mental health day,” it can be a disaster. Think about the contractor who depends on a construction crew to complete a project on a tight deadline or the printer who relies on his service reps to answer urgent client questions.
Chronic lateness is not a trivial matter. Tardy employees “delay production if you’re a manufacturing company, create customer problems if you’re in retail, and trigger morale problems for the staff who come in on time,” writes Gini Graham Scott in A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell (Amacom, 2007).
As maddening as chronic lateness can be, however, employers need to keep a cool head when looking for a solution. The goal should be to fix the behavior, not eliminate the employee. It’s always costly to hire and train new workers and, with unemployment at 4.5% nationally, in many parts of the country it can take weeks or months to find a new hire.
To deal with lateness, Scott recommends that the owner start with “a heart-to-heart conversation. Explain why it’s a problem for the business, ascertain why the person is late, and focus on problem solving.”
Involving the employee in addressing the issue is far more effective than telling the employee what to do, notes Roberta Matuson, president of Human Resource Solutions, an HR consulting firm based in Northampton, Mass. An apt question that she recommends: “What is it you need to do to get to work on time?”
It’s also important to stay in control and not let your anger show. “You can’t deal with a problem rationally if everyone is screaming and yelling,” Scott notes. She encouraged business owners to act like policemen, who maintain control in very tense situations by being detached and not getting emotionally bent out of shape.
Kathleen de Flaun, who runs a Mail Boxes Etc. franchise in New York City, has seen how lateness can hurt a small service business. She depended on her trusted employees to open up in the mornings, a critical time for clients to pop in on their way to work. Instead of arriving at 8:30 a.m., however, she learned that the staff was drifting in at 8:45 or 9:00—even her manager. Customers were stuck waiting in the cold.
Now, if employees are late, they know they that there are consequences. Depending on how late they are, de Flaun deducts a half hour or hour from their paychecks and reduces their weekly bonus, which is based on daily sales goals and also includes incentives for additional sales. She has created a checklist of penalties: First time late draws a warning, second time the bonus is cut by $5, third time by $20 and fourth time no bonus. She has considered offering bonuses for being on time, but she thinks rewarding staff for doing their job isn’t a good idea.
| Resources: |
| How to Manage Problem Employees: A Step-by-Step Guide for Turning Difficult Employees into High Performers, written by Glenn Shepard (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). |
| A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell, written by Gini Graham Scott (Amacom, 2007). |
The system hasn’t eliminated tardiness, but it reduces the wear and tear on the boss. “If I blow up for the hundred and tenth time that won’t get me anywhere, but to have a petulant employee,” de Flaun says. Still, she says, the employees know the boss is not pleased.
Why doesn’t de Flaun fire repeated latecomers? The most frequent latecomers, she acknowledges, “are my best employees.”
But letting some employees get away with breaking the rules—even if they are paying penalties—can be bad for the organization, says Scott. If an employee has had adequate warnings and the boss has made it clear that this behavior is hurting the business, the boss may need to follow through with dismissal. Firing an employee sends a clear signal. It shows that “you’re going to be tough when you have to be and certain kinds of behavior are unacceptable,” Scott says.
Where de Flaun did the right thing was in establishing written policies. Too many small businesses are reluctant to “go corporate” and fail to establish formal policies about absenteeism and tardiness, Matuson says. That’s a mistake because boundaries must be set in writing. Making the rules clear and spelling out penalties helps employers and employees. Policies should be written down and distributed to employees when they are hired so there are no questions about what the boss expects.
Of course, it helps not to hire chronically late employees in the first place. “Most small business owners fail to call references. But if you did, you could ask how reliable was the employee? How often was he late in the last month? Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior,” Matuson notes. Asking these questions is permissible and doesn’t any break any laws, though past employers have a right not to answer them.
Scott Livingston, president of Horst Engineering, in East Hartford, Conn., has little tolerance for lateness in his 75-person precision-machinery company, which serves demanding clients in the aerospace and high-tech industries. “We measure our business cycle in seconds, so lateness creates problems,” he says.
His approach is to treat his highly skilled employees as grownups who don’t need to be nagged.“We treat people with respect and expect them to take responsibility,” he says.
Horst says lateness has seldom been a problem because everything is done as a team and peer pressure exerts influence on workers to get in on time. If one worker is late and the project is delayed, the team suffers. If lateness occurs several times, supervisors deal with the issues during performance appraisals.
Three Pointers:
- If an employee who has always showed up on time starts to arrive late, don’t let it slide—ask what has changed. “Lateness can be a symptom that they don’t like their job or are having a problem at home,” Scott notes. Consider contacting your healthcare provider, which may offer Employee Assistance Programs, which can help employees who are having personal problems.
- Be flexible—where you can be. If an employee can’t get to work at 8:30 a.m., maybe a 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift would be more productive for her.
- Think positive: Team rewards can reinforce on-time behavior. Scott says a contracting firm he knows posts a chart, recording when each member of a five-man crew shows up. If they rack up a perfect on-time record for the week, the manager takes the team out to dinner Friday night as a reward. “Peer pressures helps to get everyone in on time,” she notes.
