Well, it depends. In my line of work (software development), I’d much rather have hard-working and tardy. In others, punctuality is an absolute must. But lazy people are just a pain in the ass. You always end up doing their work for them. I’d definitely can a punctual but lazy type under any circumstances, but it would depend on the impact to the company what I’d do about a person who works hard but comes in late.
I’m in the restaurant business and need punctual employees. It’s not a difficult job, and it all gets done over the course of the day, but I have to know when to expect my crew. When the doors open, there might not be any customers for another 30 minutes or there might be several waiting to be let in. Those who are waiting to come in and spend their money won’t come back and spend more if they can’t get what they want or there’s no one to serve them.
By “tardy” do we mean actually late, as in not showing up when scheduled to, or do we mean a person who has legitimately scheduled to work later hours?
I’m about to enter into negotiations for what might be my first full-time job. I have a horror of working early hours–I simply don’t feel good if I sleep 10-6, as opposed to 12-8 or, even better, 1-9. I don’t think as well, I don’t learn as well, I don’t do as well. The job will be as a researcher, so I’m wondering if I have any latitude to ask about later hours. If I show up to the office at 10, is it okay? Surely one can’t miss many meetings if one is there at 10?
OK, while I understand the importance of being there on time, I have to ask…
do you guys have to stand in the corner if you talk while you’re on the clock?
It depends somewhat on how big a staff you have. If there are few employees one can screw it up pretty badly.
If you work in a big place ,coming in late often is a measurable. Eventually it will be known and the info moved up a ladder to where some boss will say we won’t put up with this.
In my experience, you’d miss almost all of them. I just got done with a 1.5 hour meeting, and it is 9:30 where I am.
I’ve worked a lot of jobs where punctuality isn’t a huge issue, but I’ve met very few of these “tardy but highly effective” types. In my general experience, the tardy types are the lazy types.
(bolding mine)
Hey, I resemble that remark! 
Tardy means you’ve missed your scheduled start time, appointment, etc…
So if you’re scheduled to work at 09:00, when everyone else starts at 07:00… no, you’re not tardy. That’s your start time.
I don’t agree with this, though, as you’ve stated, others’ mileage may vary. In my experience, if someone is constantly forced to come to work early and leave late, they either aren’t managing their time appropriately enough during the day to complete their work well and on time or they have way too much work and need it to be delegated more effectively.
Then there’s secret option c and d, which is that the employee enjoys his/her job so much they can’t be torn away or that they’re trying very hard to impress someone. While c happens, it doesn’t happen often. D happens way too often, and I find it somewhat disappointing when people think that someone’s productive and/or effective just because they’re physically at their desk early and/or late.
Raguleader - Oddly enough, it seems its very difficult to get fired for work-related issues. It takes a year of doing almost nothing before anything happens. And it’s a hard company to get hired on with. But they apparently care very much that you’re in your chair at the appointed time. They allow us (within 2 hours or so) do determine what our start time is, but once you’ve agreed to that, you’d better be there, whether you work or not.
StG
I asked my boss this question and he said “As long as they get their job done, I don’t care what their hours are - hey, if they can get more done in less time, that saves us money.”
It’s a good thing because I’m never exactly sure when I’m going to show up. I never run the same first thing in the morning. I wake up around 6:30 to get to work around 8 (I work about 2 miles away from where I live, maybe 3…sometimes I shower the night before and sometimes I shower in the morning…), but sometimes I’m 10-15 minutes late and sometimes I’m 30 minutes early. However, I get shit done. In fact, I have to find an excuse to stay here the rest of today - I’ve finished my entire day’s work in two and a half hours (except for obituaries, which come in all day, which is the only reason for staying and not taking off early, because no one else wants to do obits). Now, if there’s something unusual going on, like a political conference or a meeting of some sort, I’ll take special pains to be here early so that I’m definitely on time. But on a normal workday, it’s a toss-up as to whether I’m going to get there before my boss or vice versa.
Now, when I opened the store at Domino’s, I had to have it done by a particular time, so I made absolutely sure that I’d be there by a certain time (if not sooner) every day. But seeing as my boss is lenient about it and they all love me, I fudge a bit here.
~Tasha
just points up at what all Nava said
Just wanted to point out this is true. I teach, and if someone is no call/no show at the bell, I suspect we’d call the cops out of concern. I am sure it’s happened at some point in the last few years, but I don’t remember it. It just doesn’t happen.
One thing I am not sure that afternoon people understand about morning people: just because you are more productive later in the day doesn’t mean we are–so if you don’t see me as being productive after you get here at 10, remember that my best time is 6-8 AM, and, frankly, I am spinning my wheels from 3 on. I get the job done, but I’m not creative and I am easily distracted.
My experience is skewed, because for most of my career I’ve been in jobs where scheduling is vital – often scheduling to the minute. If you’re late, the work doesn’t get done, the doors don’t open, or there’s no one there to answer the phone when people from the Eastern Time Zone call.
My mother was chronically tardy – for everything except her job. She was a nurse and if her shift started at 7:00, she was, by golly, awake and present and ready to relieve the overnight nurse.
I hate mornings, but if you tell me I have to be there at 4:45 a.m. (and I did have a job which required me to be there at 4:45) then I’ll be there.
Let me explain this-
If you work in an office and everyone starts at 9:00 and you’re the person that comes flying in the door at 9:10 or 9:15 frazzled with excuses about your cat, traffic, etc. regardless of how efficient you are when you get there, people will always remember you as the person that’s always late.
It wrongly clouds people’s judgement of you.
If I was the boss, of course I’d want the person that got the most work done. But unless the boss knows you, a tardy person doesn’t give that impression.
Some places get paid for the amount of hours an employee works. If you come late and the place has a closing time ,or they do not want to extend hours ,then it costs them money. Companies take that personally.
From very recent experience… I work in IT (programming). My most recent project involved working with a hired contractor. Technically speaking, he was very, very, very good. But the guy couldn’t seem to be arsed to get in to work on any kind of consistent basis. 8:30 one day, 9:45 the next day, 1:45 pm the next day, 11:15 the next day, etc.
My boss (who was also this contractor’s boss) would sit him down for a chat about his work schedule about once a week. And every week, it would be the same thing, with the contractor always saying “Yeah, I’ll be here by 9:00 every day”, but then only managing it for maybe two days in a row.
Annoyed the hell out of me. Not necessarily because he always showed up late, but it was the lack of consistency that I couldn’t stand. Honestly, if he had come to me (as his IT Lead) or to my manager, and said “Hey, look, I work better later in the day, is it ok if I have my regular work hours from 10 am till 6:30 pm?” I would have had no problem with that whatsoever. As long as his schedule was consistent, I can work with it. But when he tells me one afternoon “Yeah, we can talk about requirement X first thing tomorrow morning” and then “first thing tomorrow morning” ends up being 2 pm after I’ve been at work for 6 hours, it annoys me.
And this went on for the better part of 6 months. My boss didn’t dare get rid of him because he knew we wouldn’t get permission to hire a replacement (stupid office politics or something), and there was no way we could have completed the project without him. But I certainly wasn’t sad to see that contractor go.
Of course, we had a second contractor hired as a tester… she was both lazy and tardy… show up at 10, take a 2-hour lunch at 11, leave at 3:30… bill for a 9 hour day. Can’t say anyone was really sad to see her go (and she actually was fired) either.
i was just thinking about this today, when my boss showed up over an hour late for work for the second day in a row. (She “overslept”. Again. I’m actually wondering if she’s an alcoholic or something…how can you sleep through your alarm so completely (enough that she’s not even awake when someone from work calls to ask where she is after her scheduled start time) so often? Maybe sleeping pills?) I’m sure she thinks she’s in the “hardworking and tardy” category, but the truth of the matter is that she likes to gab incessantly, mostly about herself, and she wastes a lot of time in general. However, she thinks she makes up for all this by staying late and working Saturdays…well, IMO, she wouldn’t need to do all that overtime if she’d actually do her job during her regularly scheduled hours.
I will echo the sentiment that “hardworking” does not always equal “effective”.
This topic has come up here (as in the Dope) before and I think one good point that gets made is that it can depend on your office culture. We start roughly at 8 here, but my boss and even his boss come in anywhere between 7:30 and 8:30 regularly, and they’re fine with us doing the same. If there’s an early meeting, we’re expected to be on time (Well, “on time” here being defined as arriving ~5 minutes after the meeting is scheduled to start. No meetings actually start at the time they’re scheduled. I usually walk into conference rooms 1-2 minutes after a meeting’s start time, and 90% of the time I’m the first person there.) but otherwise the company has a general mentality of get your work done and be available when the boss needs you but otherwise there really isn’t a requirement to be here at 8:00 on the dot.
So the company culture can play into what “on time” and “late” mean.
My mileage varies considerably. I have the good fortune to work for a company and a boss that has moved to ROWE (results-only work environment). This means I literally do not care if my team members are working or not. Today, I was on the office, which is kind of unusual for a Friday. I know at least two of my team were working, because one IMed me and I saw another in the office. But the other 4 could have been at a movie as far as I know.
And my team supports 150-plus users for a top-10 ecommerce site. So it’s not like there isn’t work to do on a Friday; we’ve just realized that making people show up doesn’t make them work.
Interesting fact. Do you know the highest traffic point for ecommerce sites like Circuit City, Best Buy, Walmart and so on? Noon. You know why? Because all of those office workers that have to be in the office to make the good impression are busy shopping on their lunch break. Ecommerce traffic goes down precipitously in the evenings when all those office workers leave their highspeed connections and go home.
Yes, there are positions where being punctual is more valuable than being effective, but I wouldn’t want to work in them, manage people who do or be served by those who do. Those jobs suck.