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What to Do With Tardy Employees

One or a few employees seem to be congenitally late. One or more of them are even valuable or essential employees but other tardy employees are just marginal. You want everyone to be at work on time but you also want to be flexible, especially to your valued employees who seem to put in more time at the office than most. You want to have and implement standard hours aimed at enforcing or punishing the marginal employees who sometimes arrive late assuming that if others are permitted to do so, so are they. What do you do that is fair, consistent, but not insensitive?

Tardiness is a difficult issue – much more so than absence because of the issue of “professionalism” and the emotional issue of “respect”. Absence is pretty straight-forward – you are either absent more times than permitted, or you are not. And there are a variety of ways to attack it – from ‘docking’ pay for excessive absences to a warning system and, finally, to termination.

How important is having your employees at their desks working at your company’s start time? It’s extremely important if no one is present when the phone rings – but that is very rarely the case. The phones don’t commonly start ringing off the hook at exactly 8:30 or 9:00 and it is a very rare occasion when all employees are late on the same day. So, assuming that it is not a critical issue, is it important enough to establish hard-and-fast rules with punitive issues if broken? Or should tardiness policies be a guideline that requires ‘make-up’ time and cooperation to assure customers are served if someone is late? That depends on whether the employees subjected to these rules are considered professionals or clerks.

One very important caveat – start time is the time the office opens and when all employees (without specific arrangements with management) are expected to be at work. The occasional tardiness that is excused by rational and reasonable reasons should always be treated with flexibility (unless in a very regimented organization). The tardiness that we address in this article is the occasional lateness without good cause. Employees are not permitted to re-set their own work hours even if they work late every night. Changing hours or flex-time is a different issue and can only be addressed by management decision.

Try calling the law firm that you use at 9:00 – how many of the lawyers (or even paralegals) are present? Yet the secretaries and assistants are there when the office opens. The lawyers and paralegals are considered professionals and are expected to put in the hours necessary to get the job done, always much more than the 35 – 40 hours required of clerical employees before overtime kicks in. The clerical employees at many law firms are also expected to work extended hours on occasion, but they are (or should be) paid overtime and are, therefore, subjected to more stringent rules (like timeliness) under penalties if broken.

How different are insurance agencies from law firms? Some of your employees have CLU, CPCU, and other acronyms following their names and indicating levels of professional status in the industry. Others are true clerical employees. But we tend to treat all employees but owners, producers (and some managers) as clerical-type employees for most agency regulations. What makes this issue even more complicated is that, in recent year, we have been on a march to ‘professionalize’ those very employees that we treat like clerks.

So what shall we do?

IF you want your technical employees (and managers) to act like professionals, you must treat them as professionals. This means that they are expected to react to customer issues and requests regardless of how much time it takes to accomplish the goal. It also means that if they occasionally need to be late, it’s o.k. – that time is more than made up for early mornings, late evenings and weekend work when needed.

On the other hand, if all employees are clerical (even the purportedly technical employees) then a strict tardiness policy is acceptable and, regardless of value to the agency, if an employee exceeds acceptable tardiness policy, standardized corrective actions must be taken. You cannot afford to make exceptions because the lawsuit will always come from the former employee for whom exceptions were NOT permitted.

Another issue affecting how agencies treat tardiness is emotional in nature. Many older agency owners and managers have a work ethic that was prevalent in the 1950’s through the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. That work ethic involves being at work on time, dressed appropriately to serve the customers and working whatever hours were necessary to satisfy the customers.

These owners and managers feel that if they are able to be at work at the agency’s start time ALL employees should have the same work ethic. They recognize that the younger generations have different priorities (always considered as less work-oriented) but assume that this change of priorities can be changed to match the older owners’ work ethic. And, most importantly, any disregard of that work ethic is considered DISRESPECT for the owners and managers.

Some of these owners and managers are ‘martyrs’ by nature. They have become successful by working long and hard hours, so their work ethic must be the right one and anyone working for them must adhere to it. They really don’t consider the high percentage of divorces that have occurred among this ‘high-impact’ group of owners and managers. Nor do they consider the thousands of hours of golf (and other recreational activities) justified by how hard these owners work during the rest of the year that is not available to their lower-level employees.

In fact, Generation X, Y and Z (the more recent generations of employees) are more family-centered and, while not abandoning the workplace, try to put their priorities in an order that will provide them personal stability as well as professional success. Often, the pressure of the employer is diametrically opposed to the family priorities of these employees – not a pleasant situation.

Of course, the ‘Do As I Say, Not As I Do’ group of owners is still present (although growing fewer in numbers). These owners are autocratic leaders and benevolent dictators who expect their employees to be at work on time, regardless of when (and if) the owners show up at all.

Both of these owner types must understand that, with some notable exceptions, tardiness does NOT reflect a lack of respect from the employees to the owners or to each other. If you ever feel ‘outrage’ by the tardiness of your employees, that ‘respect’ issue is probably at the core. Don’t lose good employees because of your impression of their reasons for being late. Find out what caused the problem and remember the consistency rule – no policy is necessarily wrong if managed consistently.

The decision on how to handle tardiness will still be argued in every owners’ meeting. The best idea is to differentiate the professional classes of employees from the clerical classes of employees and to institute procedures and rules commensurate with they type of employee at issue. Clerical employees are traditionally non-exempt and are subject to overtime. They should have more stringent requirements for being to work on time.

Professional employees should be given greater latitude, acknowledging that they contribute based on the job, not on the hour of the day. And we should also acknowledge that their work ethic is not at question. Just because they don’t work like the boss doesn’t mean that they are not just as proud of their accomplishments and should be treated with the same respect that they apply to their employers. However, performance problems should not be prosecuted because of tardiness when the real reason that management is critical of them goes far beyond timeliness issues.