Coming late for work. Every employer nervously shrugs his/her shoulders at a mere thought of employees being late for their job and thus not being able to fulfill their daily tasks.
“Why are they late? Can’t they just come in time, according to their work schedule?” managers question themselves every time they watch their workers running hastily to their workplaces and trying to pretend that it’s okay, and it’s only 9 a.m., not 11 a.m.
Well, that just happens. Numerous scientific and psychological experiments proved that people can be late for almost any event, regardless of its importance. In particular, a research conducted several years ago in the U.S. by Proudfoot Consulting showed that even top managers of American companies are late for 8 meetings out of 10. It was also calculated that it results in nearly $100 billion loss to an American economy. The figures are quite shocking, aren’t they?
Google and Yahoo: They, Too, Have Problems
In 2011, when Larry Page has become Google’s CEO, one of his first initiatives was to fight lateness problem in the company. Let’s recall that Google is traditionally viewed as one of the best employers in the world along with the fact that it has the most expensive commercial brand (estimated to stand for $100 billion).
One of the solutions implemented was Google’s Attendance Tracker, available for Androids. The app was aimed at helping staff to keep records of all work-related information (including meetings, daily attendance and detailed work schedules).
Perhaps the brightest example of top-rank managers who are frequently mentioned when it comes to lateness is Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO. Numerous stories concerning her being late for important meetings and oversleeping dinners are periodically flooding the Web.
Cultural Aspects
The problem with latecomers is especially difficult to deal with in large corporations which employ people of various nationalities. Cultural misunderstandings tend to become almost unbearable in many cases. As a result, conflicts between managers and staff take loads of time and good humour.
Edward Hall, an American anthropologist, defined 5 time intervals for the duration of being late in Western countries:
- 5 minutes – a person mumbles, finding no plausible reason as to why he/she was late (after all, it’s not taken that much time);
- 15 minutes – the person makes meaningless excuses;
- 20-30 minutes – those who are waiting feel a bit resentful about delay;
- 40 minutes – quite strong resentment among those who wait prevails;
- longer than 40 minutes – stands for a highly insulting behaviour and total disrespect.
However, countries within Western culture vary. For example, Spaniards, French and Italians can wait for almost half an hour if the person is late and do not take it as an offence. People in Latin America think it normal to be late for as much as 30-40 minutes. Representatives of Islamic culture are not generally keen on hurrying and afford themselves to be late.
On the contrary, Swiss, Germans, Japanese, Swedes and British consider it outrageous to be late for longer than 5-7 minutes. The same is true for Americans and Australians.
No surprise that with such different approaches to time and punctuality lateness still remains the problem of literally eating productive work time.
Can’t Anything Be Done About It?
It leaves no doubt that the problem with lateness just has to be fought – the losses it causes is viewed by most employers as sufficient reason for punishments and firing. However, such methods are not going to be beneficial neither to the company nor to the employees.
Alternative: Attendance Tracking
Automatic attendance tracking, could be the case for overcoming late arrivals. After all, times of manually checking the time of arrivals and leavings is no longer effective.
With competition intensifying literally every day companies just can’t afford themselves to ignore discipline violations. So, why not to use the solution from Yaware.TimeTracker? Every chance to improve performance is a chance to survive at the marketplace, further attract new customers and expand. And employee productivity and discipline is not an exception.
