Overall it’s just a losing game to try and run an office like it’s a factory. If you don’t need your team to all be on the conveyor belt working in tandem to get the job done, then let them work when it’s best for them. Study after study has shown that people will give you their best, most productive selves if you only allow them to.
Having spent my entire working life in the Washington DC area, with unpredictable and unbelievably congested traffic patterns, I can’t tell you how many times I had to listen to some blowhard going off about what time it was. This while I was working on salary and putting in 60+ hours per week. All these nitpicky rules ever accomplished was to greatly decrease my respect for management, both as a whole, and as individuals.
In the 15+ years that I supervised teams I never once found it necessary to counsel anybody about what time they did their work. I treated adult professionals as such, and managed the work, not the bodies. All of my teams were highly productive and successful.
My attitude as well. I have been a worker and a manager, but only ever had one short period where I had to clock in - I soon found a better job with a more enlightened management.
Same here AHunter3. But they better trust me, I’ve worked there for over 30 years.
Many of us are working from home now. I’ve always started my day at 7. And interestingly enough, many of the other folks are now too.
My days fluctuate and sometimes I work a little on the weekend. I often work 7-5 and run a couple of errands during lunch. It all adds up in the end.
The freedom to work from home (for those of us that can and want to) did not turn out to be the problem management thought it would, at least for us. But I work with a real good crew that takes pride in their work.
As far as the 5 minutes grace period, I don’t see anything really wrong with that. I guess it depends on your job. And I one of those ‘on time’ fanatics.
Not exactly. The difference between a grace period and a 5-minute-later start time is that if you show up at 9:06, you’re counted 6 minutes late, not 1 minute late.
Still, I agree with the general concept: either way there’s a specific time after which you’re counted late, and people who can’t manage to get there by one specific time probably couldn’t be counted on to get there by a 5-minutes-later specific time.
A person used to be able to just set their alarm clock, wristwatch, car clock, etc. all 5 minutes ahead, to trick themselves into being on time, but nowadays that’s harder to do since people rely on phones and other devices to tell them the time.
There’s also the point that, sometimes, there might be specific circumstances (like bus schedule timing or having to drop off kids at a specific time) that make 9:05 a lot easier time to get there than 9:00.
I agree with everyone who says that, if you really do mean all jobs, this is a bad idea. It depends on both the job and the person whether it makes sense.
Yeah, that’s dumb, and counter productive. My experience was the opposite. When i started my job we had “flex time”, you were expected to work a certain number of hours (and i was salaried, and worked more than that, like every other salaried employee) and you were supposed to pick a start time with your manager’s approval.
Initially, we had “core hours” that everyone was supposed to work to make it easy to schedule meetings (9-3, i think). But then we acquired a large Seattle subsidiary, and many teams had people on both coasts, and expecting everyone to be at their desk by 9ET became unreasonable. So we had people who showed up at 7ET to beat rush hour, people who trickled in at 9:15ET after getting their kids off to school, and West Coast employees who started their day at 11:30ET. Each team made it work. And that wasn’t terribly onerous.
Yeah, we were all bean counters. (Actuaries) There were things we had to do together, but an awful lot of our work was done individually, working with a computer.
I have worked jobs with very definite expectations as to show time. And we clocked in tracked to the minute. A late show by a few minutes was not a big deal; stuff happens with traffic, etc. But the chronically late pretty quickly became the chronically no longer employed here.
The rest of the story though is that the official required show time was about 20 minutes earlier than it actually took to get the group show on the road on time. If my team (5 to 12 people) all showed up on the tick (and nothing else went wrong) we were ready so early it was painful. And we twiddled our thumbs for 20 minutes.
So in the sorta the opposite of the grace period idea, the company built in a 20-minutes “grace period” the other way that we were all expected to meet almost every time.
There was enough redundancy in the worker’s duties that one person being 15-20 minutes late would normally have all their prep tasks handled by somebody else. But once it got past about 20 minutes late, or if multiple people were late, then minute for minute the show ran late. And as team lead I got to explain to the Boss what happened. We were accountable for every minute the trains werent’ running on time.
The good news was they understood shit happens a lot, so it wasn’t a disciplinary issue, but anyone who got flagged as a roving one-person obstacle to timely production ended up with an attitude readjustment or a career change.
Depends on the emergency - if someone is blocking my driveway or if I get stuck behind a garbage truck , it might only make me 5 minutes ate, Especially if I was trying to arrive five minutes early.
I definitely don’t agree with all jobs - most, probably. But there are jobs where one person can’t leave until their relief gets there, or no one can start work until the person with the keys shows up. I’m not saying there should be write-ups for an occasional five minutes of lateness, but if there’s an actual policy of five minutes grace there are people who will never arrive before 9:05.
I’ve had jobs where you had to be on time (teaching) - so I allowed for traffic etc. and arrived early.
I’ve had jobs where the company operated flexi-time (computer programming), where you signed in and out and just had to balance your required total hours by the end of each week.
In my first year with a big company paying a great salary, I was, as usual, never late (and didn’t take a sick day either.) My end-of-year review was most gratifying.
Years later was the only time I was late. My boss was astonished. “What happened to you?”
I replied with a straight face “I was delayed by an elephant.”
My boss looked really puzzled, until I explained that there was a circus coming to perform at a huge venue opposite our office. An elephant got out of its cage and stood in the road. Police stopped all traffic until the trainer got the elephant back to safety.
It was on the news, so my excuse was accepted.
I start my day at 7-ish. And I won’t change that. Anybody that is staring at the clock making sure I show up at exactly 7 has a problem with wanting to control other humans; to me, it’s a symptom of psychopathy.
Provided I show up, I get my work done, and spend my 8+ hours in the office that day, my exact time of arrival at said office should not matter. Thankfully, my department head is in agreement, otherwise I’d just go back to working at home.
The exception to this is scheduled meetings; I will show up early for such things, as other humans are relying on me being there to start that meeting. I would also be early if I was doing shift work where I would be relieving a fellow employee, who would have to stay late if I was tardy. But for an office job, where I have tasks that I know need to be done, and deadlines to meet? As long as those deadlines ARE met, I’ll not sweat getting to work a few minutes late. Shit happens, and shit cares not about the clock.
Not having a 5 minute grace period for customer service positions is okay as long as you aren’t also expected to not have a larger-than-5 minute grace period before which you can’t clock in. Then, if everyone’s shift starts a 8 am, there will be a mad rush to clock in exactly at 8, and if it’s a large enough shift and/or flaky time system, not everyone will be in that magical 5 minute period.
For non customer service positions, there should be a big leeway anyway. I wouldn’t want to schedule a meeting within 1/2 hour of when people should be in anyway since they could be very well still checking their emails as well as running a little late.
I’d also add that if your boss is going to write you up for the rare 1-3 times per year you are 5 minutes late for something unforeseen, then there are probably other reasons too that you might want a new job.
Seven minutes, as I recall,* when I worked at Sears. You could punch in or out as early as seven minutes before or as late as seven minutes after, and it wouldn’t be counted against you (though it would affect your paycheque, which was computed by the minute).
* Possibly only five minutes – it’s been a few years.
An acquaintance of mine worked at a company that rounded the clock-in time up to the nearest 15-minute interval and the clock-out time down to the nearest 15-minute interval. So if you clocked-in at 7:46 it would register as 8:00, and if you clocked-out at 5:14 it would register as 5:00. Super shitty. 15 minutes is large block of time for a punch clock to begin with, but tilting it so far in the owner’s favor that they could get a half hour of uncompensated work would definitely run afoul of section (b). The result was that employees would sit in the parking lot for 10-15 minutes in the morning, and if they missed the clock-out cutoff at the end of the day they’d fart around for the next 10-15 minutes. I’m glad she got out of there.
I once worked a job where the person on the previous shift couldn’t leave until I arrived. It would have been very rude to arrive late. Everyone was pretty chill there, and I’m sure if I had a good excuse, no one would bitch about five minutes on a rare occiasion.
These days, the only time I have to be damn certain to be on time is for court hearings. The Judges are not amused by later arriving lawyers. Even “just five minutes” would be a big deal.
As a professor, of course I had to meet my classes on time. But other than that, my time was on my own. I did most of my research work at home anyway.
I had a friend who spent a couple years teaching in Brazil. He once described how a department meeting would go. He said a meeting would be called for 10. Around 10:30 or 10:45 a couple of unusually punctual people would arrive. The meeting might actually start at 11 or 11:15. I asked him how you run a university like that. He answered that, well, classes do have to fit a real schedule and that students who could not adjust to that unusual situation simply could not finish university.
When I spent a sabbatical in Switzerland, all classes and seminars were announced in the form xx:00 C.T. So a 2 O’clock seminar would be described as 2:00 C.T. Turns out that C.T. = cum tempore meant add 15 minutes, so it actually started at 2:15. So much for Swiss punctuality. Actually, even the trains didn’t run exactly on time. Another year, I spent a sabbatical in the town of Fribourg and took the train to Zurich every Friday for the seminar. It was invariably 5 to 10 minutes late.
A lot of jobs truly are team efforts, and in the era of Lean, they’ve scientifically hired the bare minimum. So if you have five teammates, you aren’t five minutes late; you’ve burned a half-hour.
Well, this is true if they book the daily standup right at starting time, but other than that… I’ve been on flex time for my entire career as a software developer. Because you are sometimes required to work death marches, no one really cares if you come in late or leave early, so long as you get the work done. We scheduled our daily standup for 10 AM to make sure the max number of people were there, and if you were working from home home you dialed in.
But we did pay a price for it. A lot of meetings that were supposed to start on the hour wound up starting 10 minutes late becaue some people would start their day with the first meeting, and if they were late, everyone had to wait. But it was much more common for a meeting to be late because of equipment trouble, booking issues, or key players who were off somewhere else in the office and we had to wait for them.
Other than that, flex time is great. It makes everyone happier and more productive. Working to a clock doesn’t work for knowledge workers. There’s nothing more destructive than having to artificially stop working when you’re in ‘the zone’ and coding as fast as you can type, or forcing people to come in to work when they are tired and not thinking clearly. So night owls are accomodated as well as morning people.
I’ve worked in 24/7 organizations several times in my life. If I was late, the person on the previous shift had to cover until I got there. Ditto for the person following me.
My mother was one of those chronically late people who couldn’t be depended on to be on time. She was also a nurse and she NEVER was late for a shift. As far as she was concerned, it not only was disrespectful to her coworkers, it was unprofessional in her work with her patients.
One of my favorite professors like to teach an early class, 8:30 IIRC. A.M.
He would lock the door at 8:30, as he was tired of late arrivals. He warned everyone on day 1.
I worked 34 years for military, so when we entered building EVERYONE had to go through airport screening; this resulted in a hundred people waiting to get through security and lots of us were late getting to our desks, mgmt got wise and went to random screening until 9:00 when civilians started coming in
