So, random question, if you were an employer, which would you rather have working for you?
[ul]
[li]A person who gets things done, but has a chronic tardiness problem, ie: always showing up to work late[/li][li]A person who is very punctual, always on time or even a bit early, but hardly seems to get anything done all day[/li][li]Hi Opal![/li][/ul]
And of course, a related question, are these two archetypes at all very common, or do the vast majority of tardiholics tend also to be slackers, and the vast majority of punctual people tend to be rather productive?
Regardless of the additional criteria you added, it sounds like you are still asking whether you want someone that can get things done or not. The punctual person sounds pretty useless overall. It depends on the job I suppose. I am a consultant and a very general time that I am supposed to be there (within an hour or so) but even that is flexible and I never promised anyone anything. I have conference calls that I really shouldn’t miss but I can usually call in from anywhere. In my experience, many professional jobs don’t have fixed schedules or I always vary mine just enough so that no one can ever call me late unless it is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter because I do work from home, take calls in my car, and everything else.
If you are talking about someone with the responsibility of opening a retail store at 7 am sharp then the priorities may be different.
I am #1 - I am not a morning person. But I get a hell of a lot of work done, and I am most productive in the later part of the day. Some of my coworkers show up promptly at 8am and don’t do anything all day. I come in at 10* and finish 3 times as much work by noon as my coworker has from 8am to noon. And I am always willing to work long hours and put in overtime, and stay late if need be, not like some coworkers who leave exactly on the dot after 8 hours.
Do you think any of this makes a difference to my boss? Not really. Despite the fact that I get more work done overall than the early birds, she loves to get on my case about it whenever she needs an excuse to be bitchy.
*My boss allows me to come in at 10am so there is someone in the offer later in the day to handle our west coast clients.
I would prefer not to take either, frankly. As someone in a technical field, competency/ability trumps face time every day of the week. On the other hand, someone who is not reliably there when he/she is supposed to be is dropping the ball on a major part of the job, which is being available for other people to consult with or talk to when expected, or to provide ground cover in the event of a crisis.
If they know can’t or won’t make it in until 10am on a regular basis, they should make it part of their employment and work out some kind of arrangement where their “expected hours” are 10-6 or what have you, as opposed to simply showing up “chronically tardy” (by which I take to mean, saying “I promise I’ll be in by 8/9” and then simply not doing so again and again).
I have never known a “tardiholic” who has been effectual. There was one guy I can recall who was a pretty brilliant programmer, but came in very late almost every Monday and occasionally during the week, as well as often calling in sick around 10am, due to what became clear was a substance abuse issue. In a team environment this inevitably cut into his reliability and “effectiveness” beyond what mere flashes of brilliance could compensate for.
More often, frequent tardiness is a sign of disaffection – not necessarily incompetence (after all, they got past all the screening and interviewing processes), but an indication that someone is dissatisfied with their role or compensation or environment and is looking (or dreaming of being able) to leave.
That said, there’s also no lack of clock-punching, clock-watching chair jockeys in the cubicles of the nation…
As a boss, I don’t give a damn when or how often an employee shows up, as long as he gets his job done on time. If the “job” is opening the store so that customers can give us money, lateness would be a problem.
As a person, late people drive me right up a wall and back down again. I’ll employ Late Larry, but I won’t socialize with him.
In my limited experience, I’ve notice a very slight trend toward the most competent employees being fanatically punctual, and the least competent employees being both chronically late & absent.
I’m kind of a big deal at my consulting firm. Basically I don’t care what people do so long as
a) they get the job done on time and
b) I can get ahold of them wherever they are when I need them
This doesn’t really work. At least not with me. If I was supposed to wake up at 7 for an 8 o clock job, I know it. If I’m late all the time, and told I’m expected at 9, I’m not waking up at 7 and getting ready.
There is a lazy ass in me, somewhere between conscious and unconscious who knows what time it is - he just doesn’t get up. Just ten more minutes, then sleeps for twenty. If he really wanted to wake up earlier for work and get there consistently on time, he’d do that.
You sound like me when I was in my mid-20’s. One time, when I showed up at a little before noon, several people ushered me into my section head’s office, where his whiteboard showed a grid of arrival times, with peoples’ initials in them. They had actually taken bets on when I’d show up. (My department manager, showing true understanding, had bet on a ‘no show.’)
a person with strange hours but who gets stuff done on time.
I’m goal-oriented. If I have someone who has problems dragging himself out of bed and who doesn’t wake up until after lunch (for example, not that I’ve ever had a few hundred coworkers who match that profile), I’d much rather change their working hours to those when they’ll be able to be productive, if it’s possible. I find the usual system an unhealthy waste of time and I hate waste - of anything.
And I’m one of those people who are perfectly happy turning up at 6am, awake, but who dread the thought of staying late. I’m useless late.
In one of my jobs, I worked 8-4 and my coworker 11-7. HR was grumbly, but the work was done, the boss was happy, us two were happy, what’s not to like?
Seriously, back when I was a (minor) manager, I told the team I wanted them to do 5 things for me:[ol]
[li]Get the job done.[/li][li]Tell me when I’m wrong.[/li][li]Ask me when they aren’t sure (about anything – requirements, how to do something best, whatever…)[/li][li]Tell me they’re falling behind when it happens, not the day the work is due.[/li][li](Relevant to this thread) Tell me if they’re out of office between 10AM and 4PM. Get the rest of your hours in whenever you like.[/ol][/li]
The last proviso was so I could count on required team-work and meetings happening. I tried to avoid setting meetings outside these hours if at all possible.
This worked well for nearly 4 years (my time at that company) – and they all busted their chops to get the job done, and on time, when they needed to.
Disagree. I have never seen any correlation. Unless you mean people who are habitually late to actual appointments or meetings or shop-opening, etc… those should be tortured first and shot later. But I’m not talking about that.
To those and to the ones who are IM’ing or answering their email at meetings, I’d apply the recipe that Spanish Republicans indicate for dealing with kings: hang the worst ones using as ropes the guts of the best ones.
Well, this has been a cool thread. So the consensus is:
If you say you will be in the office at 5AM, be there at 5AM
If you can’t be in the office at a given time, let someone know ahead of time
If you can only work in some particular set of non-9-to-5 timeframe, let your boss know so you can work it out
If you are the boss, and you have a productive employee who just can’t do the 9-to-5 thing, see if you can work out a schedule that makes the best of the employee’s capabilities (within reason, of course; the employee needs to be able to work when the business is doing business, in most cases)
I thought this up yesterday when I showed up for work 5 minutes late. I was having one of those days where I was just late for everything. 10 minutes late for my 9AM class, 5 minutes late for my noon class, hell, I was even late for lunch. I showed up for work 5 minutes into my shift and hit the ground running (easy enough to do when your job mainly involves shelving books). Nobody seemed upset, and in fact, I was told that I am the most reliable student worker in the library I work in, despite the fact that I rarely see anyone else being late.
I suppose a library isn’t exactly a schedule-intensive place to work so long as the books end up on the shelves they’re supposed to be on.
Well to end up asking the question posed in the OP I guess you would have to be in the position of having already unknowingly hired one of each. So which to get rid of - the punctual slacker usually. I would point out to Mr Tardy that it was only his level of productivity that allowed him to keep his job but now his tardiness makes him next in line to take the bus out of here (if his tardiness mattered).
Under some circumstances I suppose a punctual but lazy employee could be preferred but I struggle to imagine how. However you always have to weigh up an employee’s strengths and weaknesses.
I was asked by a project manager at work whether I had any recommendations amongst a bunch of contract analyst/programmers who had applied for a job. At the time our site was the biggest employer of IDMS people in the country, so I had worked with all of them. I recommended a guy and the project manager told me that everyone else had cautioned against him because he was a “cowboy”. I told him that a cowboy was exactly what he needed. He was employing people because he was behind schedule, he had a well established, efficient test team who were hardly flat out, he had a team of essentially unimaginative, in-house maintenance programmers cutting code and he needed some quick results.
So the guy I recommended could cut code probably 5 to 10 times faster than his drones. The code would be buggy and carelessly coded but essentially correctly structured and effective. His test team would find the errors, if the code was given to someone else to correct they would be able to do it without having to start from scratch. So I thought the guy that everyone else thought was last choice was ideal. And so it turned out.
So really it is horses for courses. Just weigh up the variables and make your choice.
The problem is that with many jobs, you aren’t working in a vacuum. There may be other people depending on you to complete your task or to be available when the rest of the company is working.
Most of my work is project based, so if the guy who stayed late strolls in late in the morning, the rest of the team is stuck waiting for him.
And if you’re going to come in late, you better be freakin awesome when you are working. We had one guy who had the “I come in late but I work better” attitude. Problem is he didn’t. His work product was as sloppy as his punctuality.
I was one of those people who never thought much about being just a tad tardy. You know, 2 minutes late this morning, 5 minutes late the next, a minute early the third. I have a long drive and I never know exactly what traffic is going to do. And since I often left late, I didn’t see what the big deal was. Also, I’d gone from being a salaried employee (and my prior company allowed hourly employees 7 minutes leeway on tardiness) to being an hourly employee. Then, as of the first of the year, my company decided if you were one minute late you were tardy. If you were 30 minutes late you might as well not show at all, because the penalties were the same. 12 accrued 1-29 tardies or 6 30 minute/no shows and you are fired. So I mentally moved my working hours up by 15 minutes. Yesterday I got to work at 7:18. Today at 7:12. I think the attendence policy is asnine, but while I work here I’ll abide by it. The HR drone has said that the people for whom attendence has been an issue in the past really haven’t been as upset about this policy as those who are normally where the should be, which goes to show that changing the policy really doesn’t do much good.
From what I’ve seen, hard working and punctual seem to go together, just as do tardy and lazy. Everybody is late sometime, maybe an accident occurs in front of you on the way to work. But heavy traffic is no excuse. If you care about the job, you leave home earlier to compensate for expected traffic delays. The point is, if you are habitually tardy, the reason probably has to do with a general disrespect for your job. I don’t think the tardy person will be the office dynamo. More likely, the most productive person will be the same one who arrives early and leaves late. YMMV
The remarkable volume of “Who cares as long as you’re on time” responses suggests everyone works project-related office jobs. Which may be common in Internet message boards but it’s not a normal mix in the real world.
Lots of jobs simply don’t have room for tardiness. Working on the production line in a factory? You need to be ready to work exactly at a certain time. Working in a call centre? Show up on time or your job is not being properly done. You’re a soldier? Get the fuck out of bed, private! You’re a schoolteacher? If class commences at 8:30 you had best be there at 8:25.
In a few jobs, “late but effective” is okay, but in most it’s not and it’s never really okay. As msmith points out, people who claim to be tardy but effective are usually ineffective as well. If you were a smart, effective person, you’d figure out a way to be on time.
