Are Your Employees Getting to Work on Time?

Employee tardiness is a big problem for companies. It’s associated with lower productivity, and turnover, and other negative metrics. It can cause all sorts of problems with scheduling tasks and responsibilities during the workday. It’s just a nuisance and a serious issue for managers and supervisors who need to keep everything running smoothly. But sometimes, your response to lateness issues can actually change the corporate culture, and make the company stronger and more flexible in key ways.

For example, you’re going to want to understand why your employees are showing up late. Is it because they just unenthused and suffer from low morale, and they don’t care about their jobs? Or do they really have important things to do at certain hours of the day? Figure this out, and then tailor your response accordingly, to grow your company stronger over time.

Provide for Family Schedules

The bottom line is that no matter what you do, your employees are still going to have to drop the kids off at school. They’ll still have to deal with their toddlers’ temper tantrums in the morning. And they’ll still need to pump breast milk, as shown so abundantly clearly by the federal government mandate to have pumping facilities in the workplace. But new mothers don’t just need the facilities. They need the time.

One of the best first things that companies can do to figure out productivity and lateness issues is to simply give their employees, parents and others, the tools that they need to run their families, and also do their jobs well. That means allowing certain kinds of lateness, because they’re necessary. It means working with employees’ personal schedules to craft a resolution that works. So allow time for pumping. Allow time for transit.

Options and Flex Time

How do you allow this when you have important meetings to run?

For one thing, you need to figure out a plan for how to get everybody together at a time when everyone can be there. Think about 1:00 in the afternoon. Hardly anybody has specific family issues going on at one in the afternoon. You can take a page from the lower European ‘siesta’ and schedule a time for everybody to stop everything else and huddle together for important meetings. Another thing you can do is to allow flexible time to let people pick up the slack that was created when they had to go run a family errand first thing in the morning. So for example, instead of knocking off promptly at five, let parents who came in at ten work till six. It sounds like a small thing, but often looms big in terms of correcting problems with lateness that indicate deeper underlying problems with work culture.

Related Content: The Key to Planning Your Day to Maximize Your Productivity

Look for Results

It’s also important to look for results to make sure people aren’t taking advantage of the freedoms that a company may give them.

But how do I do that? How can you look for results when you’re also allowing people freedom?

Too many people think of this as a dichotomy. It’s not. You can demand results from people even while you give them the kinds of freedom that self-employed people get — making their own hours, coming to work essentially when they can, and making their own schedules. In most jobs that don’t involve specific interactions with customers on a 9-to-5 basis, this works. What managers have to do is figure out a way to look at what someone has done throughout the day or week, and analyze it in terms of productivity. There has to be some kind of practical accountability for the time that people were supposed to be at work, and the money that the company pays them to work.

Over time, you’ll get good at sniffing out people who are taking advantage of the system. When the results are chronically late, or they’re not good quality, or they’re not there, it’s time to have a conversation, regardless of whether that person is showing up on time or not.

About Full Steam Staffing

Full Steam Staffing is a full-service staffing agency focused on providing clerical and light industrial staffing solutions to manufacturers, distribution centers and other organizations that need qualified, reliable workers. If you are currently looking to hire and grow your workforce, contact our team of skilled recruiters today!