How to Identify and Prevent Excessive Tardiness at Work

Let’s say you have a perfect employee: Stan. Stan’s the man. He’s the most efficient worker you have, is very personable with customers, and generally boosts team morale when he’s around. The only problem is that he tends to come to work 10-20 minutes later than starting time.

That means that Stan is not a perfect employee. In fact, he’s a borderline harmful one — even if he doesn’t mean to be.

What Stan is doing is a type of absenteeism called excessive tardiness. The issue with excessive tardiness is twofold:

1. Tardiness can cause friction among your other employees who are perfectly punctual. The more they see Stan being allowed to come in late without any pushback from you or your managers, the more irritated they’ll become.
2. Tardiness can spread. Once your team members see Stan getting away with his consistent tardiness, they’ll start to consider that maybe you just don’t value punctuality in your workplace. Then maybe they’ll feel more comfortable sleeping in a bit or stopping before work to get food, and suddenly most of your team is coming in 10-20 minutes late.

Excessive tardiness needs to be nipped in the bud the moment it shows up because it will have a harmful impact on your company culture and business productivity. In this post, we’re going to walk you through how to identify, address, and remedy tardiness in the workplace.

What are some of the most common causes of excessive tardiness?

According to one study, 29% of employees show up late to work at least once a month. Tardy employees are not something you should overlook, but this doesn’t mean that you should fire them on the spot for being late twice in a row. When you notice that an employee seems like they may be starting to make a habit of being late, it’s time to take action.

In many cases, your first step to solving the tardiness problem is to try to find out what’s causing employees to be late and see if there’s anything that you can do to help. While there are a whole host of reasons that your employee could give for their lateness, generally speaking, there are usually a few common causes.

Communication problems

Instead of assuming tardiness stems from your team being inconsiderate, take personal responsibility. In many cases, a lack of clear communication can result in employees turning up late.

If you aren’t clear in expressing your expectations and neglect to outline exactly when they should arrive and what happens if they are late, your employees will have a hard time understanding why timeliness is an important issue. Being clear and honest with your team is the best place to start.

Lack of consequences

If there are no consequences for being late, then an employee may be tempted to simply let the pattern continue. After all, if the boss doesn’t mind you being twenty minutes late, then why not sleep in a little longer? Make sure you have a plan in place to handle late people that outlines steps that will be taken to address the issue before it impacts your company culture.

Traffic and conflicting commitments

Not every instance of lateness has a bigger meaning behind it. If employees have a long commute or are driving during rush hour, their excuse of “traffic” may be legitimate. While it’s true that they could just leave for work earlier, sometimes this isn’t a feasible option. For example, they may have to take the kids to school before they can leave for work.

If your employees are struggling with their start time, consider rearranging their schedule to allow them to arrive and leave at a different time in order to avoid rush hour. If a number of your employees have an especially long commute, you may want to consider allowing your team to work from home on a more regular basis.

Employees are disengaged

Unfortunately, problems at work are often behind an employee’s lateness. When your workplace environment isn’t an enjoyable place to be, your team will get more flexible with their punctuality.

Consider asking for their feedback as you seek to get to the bottom of the issue. Is there a culture of gossip or negativity that may be alienating some of your team? Is there something that’s causing them concern or causing them to feel unsafe? What changes could help improve the workplace? Your chronically late employees could be a valuable source of information, allowing you to make some much-needed changes.

Don’t forget to direct them to the human resources department in case they’d be more comfortable disclosing the reason for their late arrival there. It can be tough for business owners to break past the barriers caused by their power dynamic, and even if you notice something off about an employee’s behavior, they might be uncomfortable disclosing the personal reasons behind it to their boss.

When an employee is not engaged at work, they will have little motivation to keep close track of time and be punctual. By working to create a more engaged workforce, you’ll be able to reap a number of benefits — not only punctuality but also improved loyalty and productivity.

Employees are overworked

Overworked employees have a harder time continually arriving to work on time.

Have you considered the workload your employees have taken on or been given? Perhaps they’re overwhelmed at work and the pressure is causing them to feel discouraged and demotivated — the last thing you want employees to feel. Or it could be that they are putting in a lot of hours and working late, giving them little time to recuperate.

In some cases, you may want to consider whether your team should be taking on as much overtime as they do. If you’re short-staffed, perhaps hiring a temp worker to help with the busy season would be a better idea.

Other times, you may want to consider instituting a flexible work arrangement. Allowing your team to work from home once or twice a week or implementing a flexible work schedule could make it easier for your team to keep up with a grueling workload. Just be careful not to assign shifts at the last minute.

Management problems

If you are dealing with perpetually late employees, you might take a minute to evaluate your management. Are managers arriving on time? Are they consistently enforcing the rules? Do team members know they’re appreciated, or could they be silently suffering from low self-esteem? Consider the example your management is setting, and make sure they’re taking appropriate actions to address tardiness.

While there could be any number of reasons for an employee’s lateness, at the end of the day, it’s important to do everything that you can to ensure that your workplace is one that’s designed to encourage on-time attendance. Then, work to establish set procedures for combating lateness before it becomes an issue.

When is employee tardiness considered excessive?

One or two instances of lateness are completely fine. Life happens. Sometimes an employee sleeps through an alarm; other times, traffic is surprisingly bad. When you should consider employee tardiness to be excessive is ultimately up to your personal sensibilities — there are no standard benchmarks.

In general, we believe three instances of late arrival in the same quarterly period is enough to ring alarm bells, especially if it’s occurring with a team member who previously had no issues with punctuality. 

How to identify employees who are frequently late to work

What if you’re not always around to monitor when your employees are physically arriving at work? Perhaps some of your team work remotely, or you’re usually in your office tackling tasks in the morning. There are a few ways you can monitor when employees arrive.

Use time-tracking software

The easiest way to verify that your team members are clocking in on time is to use time and attendance tracking software. In fact, identifying excessive tardiness and absenteeism was one of the issues we set out to solve when we created Buddy Punch. We were expanding our previous business and needed a way to monitor 20 employees at three different locations.

There are three key features in Buddy Punch that let you monitor employee attendance easily and automatically: scheduling, time tracking, and notifications.

It all starts with employee scheduling. You create your work schedules using our drag-and-drop schedule builder, which lets the system know when and where your employees are supposed to be.

After that, employees clock in and out of work using Buddy Punch, which can be accessed on their computers, a central time clock kiosk, or their mobile phones. Since Buddy Punch knows when employees are scheduled to be at work, it can instantly identify when they’re late (or miss a shift entirely).

Any time you log into Buddy Punch as an administrator, you’ll see a quick view of who’s currently clocked in and out — as well as labels showing if someone clocked in late.

Of course, you don’t want to have to log in constantly to have to monitor employee attendance, so Buddy Punch also offers notifications. With notifications, you can set the system up to send you an alert (via push notification or email) when an employee clocks in late. This lets you know immediately who’s tardy for work and gives you a detailed record you can reference to identify excessive tardiness.

Want to learn more about Buddy Punch? Start a 14-day free trial (no credit card required), take an interactive tour of the product, or request a personalized demo.

Try manual sign-ins and spreadsheets

If you don’t want to have to pay for an attendance management system, you can manually track employee attendance via sign-in sheets. Place the sign-in sheets at the front of your business, in the staff room, or on a digital spreadsheet hosted on a service such as Google Docs. These options provide a physical location for employees to go to to clock in and out.  

However, there are a couple issues with using this method:

• Manual methods of attendance tracking are prone to human error. If your employee’s watch says 9:00 but the actual time is 9:10, how will you know if they’re showing up late and unaware of it? Ten minutes may not seem like a ton of time, but an employee who is 10 minutes late every day for a year would have taken the equivalent of a week’s paid vacation.
• Employees may take advantage of the system. Something as simple as one signing in for another who’s running a bit late means that you may be unaware that the team member was absent at the start of the shift. Additionally, employees can simply write down that they were on time even if they weren’t.

For these reasons, we’d advise you to limit your reliance on manual methods of timekeeping. If your budget is tight or you’re running a small business, by all means, use these while you have to. But after that, you want to start investing in time clock software since many of them go beyond simply managing attendance and help your business optimize productivity and thereby profits, making them worth the money.

Implement physical time clocks

Another option for identifying workplace tardiness is to use physical time clocks. These work similarly to time clock software by allowing you to make use of multiple punch-in options, RFID readers or PIN entries, syncing to time clock systems, and a touchscreen interface. However, there are a few issues with this method of timekeeping as well:

• Price: Physical time clocks are expensive, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars upfront. In addition, some physical time clocks come with a monthly subscription fee on top of this base charge. 
• Durability: Beyond having to deal with replacing batteries to power these physical time clocks (a fee that can add up over time) there’s a question of how long they can function. Even if they come with an unlimited warranty, there’s an expectation of downtime between having an issue and receiving a replacement unit.
• Sanitation: Sharing one physical device can bring up sanitation issues in your workplace, something that’s become more prominent in recent years.
• Location: Physical time clocks can only be used in person. You’d have to purchase multiple devices to monitor employees at multiple locations, and they can’t help you track remote workers working from home at all. 

7 ways to prevent excessive tardiness in the workplace

If you are looking for some helpful, practical ways to help get your employees to work on time, here are some ideas for improving on-time attendance.

1. Establish expectations early on

First things first, establish your expectations early on. Make sure new hires understand that on-time attendance is required. Consider having your employees sign an employment contract that outlines your expectations.

2. Communicate directly with problematic employees

Things happen; people get sick, cars break down, and sometimes traffic jams can prevent even the most diligent employee from arriving on time. If your worker, who is usually on time, starts showing up late regularly, don’t jump to conclusions or start plotting ways to punish them. Instead, talk to them.

Ideally, you’ll do this in private, since you don’t want to embarrass them in front of the team and make them less likely to heed the conversation. Talk about their noticeable lateness, their lost productivity despite it not being a complete absence, and how it goes against the rules in your employee handbook.

This initial conversation could reveal critical information about the root cause of this newly formed bad habit. Maybe there’s a family emergency happening in the employee’s life. Maybe they’re battling some sort of noncontagious illness. Maybe it’s burnout that’s got them dragging their feet to come to work. See what comes out during a conversation, and try to be understanding and polite while talking it over.

If you have rules for absenteeism written down in an employee attendance policy, now’s the time to bring them up. Additionally, you’ll want to send a follow-up email after your meeting summarizing everything you two discussed. While this serves as a nice reminder for your employee, it also serves as the beginning of a paper trail for you in case the problem isn’t rectified.

3. Offer incentives

Some companies offer positive reinforcements to motivate employees to show up on time. Incentives can include cash bonuses, gift certificates, extra vacation days, or being able to leave early on certain days.

To make a perk program work, you’ll want to ensure that you choose meaningful rewards that your workers are interested in. Business owners don’t need to reinvent the wheel here — you can just directly ask staff members what would motivate them.

You’ll also want to provide clear objectives for them to follow so they have something specific to strive for. For example, you could say that workers with 100% on-time attendance for 30 days will receive a $50 bonus, but make sure they understand that there are no exceptions.

4. Don’t play favorites

As with everything in the workplace, it’s important to always treat your team fairly. If one employee is regularly coming in late and other workers see that they’re consistently allowed to get away with it, it could seriously impact employee morale or even influence them to check in late as well. This is one reason why it’s important to curb bad habits as soon as they start.

Expect the same standard of timeliness from everyone; your employees will appreciate you for it.

5. Adjust schedules

If conflicting commitments are the cause of an employee’s consistent tardiness, you could consider adjusting their schedule to make life easier for them. Many companies also give their employees the freedom to work from home part-time.

6. Implement a strategy

Depending on whether or not a valid reason was given to explain an employee’s recent tardiness, the two of you — perhaps with the help of your human resources department — may be able to come up with clear expectations and helpful corrective actions to resolve the issue. 

Maybe you suggest they start leaving for work 10 minutes earlier than they’re used to in order to ensure they arrive on time — and that they call in when they think they’re going to run late despite this adjustment.

Maybe the employee suggests staying at the end of the day for 10 minutes longer than normal to even out their work schedule. This sort of flexible schedule could work so long as you allow it in your company policy. 

Try to be open-minded about possible solutions while protecting the integrity of your workplace.

7. Escalate if needed

Hopefully, most issues will be solved with the recommendations above. Unfortunately, there are cases where, for whatever reason, an employee isn’t able to solve the issue. In these situations, you have to be ready to escalate your methods of dealing with the issue, possibly turning to disciplinary actions.

You never want to be so stern that you’re considering getting rid of an employee after the first or second offense. It costs time and money to train new talent, and it’s much more effective to give team members a chance and direction in correcting a pattern of tardiness. However, for the special cases where this doesn’t work, you have to have a plan in place. We suggest this approach:

• First offense of excessive tardiness: Give the employee a verbal warning.
• Second and third offense: Give the employee a written warning.
• Fourth offense: Write the employee up, put them on suspension, or hold a disciplinary hearing. Make it clear this is a final warning.
• Fifth offense: Terminate the employee’s employment.

Throughout each of these escalating steps, you should make sure to keep an effective paper trail that documents your efforts to address and remedy the employee’s attendance infractions. Additionally, ensure that any cases of absenteeism do not fall under the protection of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), or any of your specific state codes.

As long as you’ve protected yourself legally, if your employee isn’t rectifying their behavior, it’s time for them to go.

Why is excessive tardiness a problem?

As we mentioned before, the main danger of excessive tardiness is how negatively it impacts the rest of your work environment. Team members will notice when one employee consistently shows up later than the rest of them, especially if it seems this action is going unaddressed. They’ll begin to suspect favoritism and may even start copying this same behavior if they feel it’s not a major concern for you or your business.

Productivity will suffer, and you may even lose out on profit if a customer arriving early is unable to receive speedy service because you don’t know where half of your scheduled team is.

All that said, here are things to keep in mind as you handle tardiness.

• Make sure to address and treat all tardiness issues the same. Follow the same procedure every time — even better if you have said procedure outlined in your employee attendance policy.
• Maintain accurate time tracking to quickly identify absenteeism. Don’t forget that time theft can make it so that you fail to notice excessive tardiness that your other team members witness but don’t report. Use a tool like Buddy Punch to ensure you have real-time, accurate data for your employees.
• Begin remedying excessive tardiness the moment it crops up before it can spread.

Excessive tardiness can hurt a workplace, but now you know everything you need to ensure your company’s environment is always protected from its effects.