Have you ever missed your train or gotten a flat tyre en route to work? Maybe
your just not a morning person or you struggle to get the kids out for school
before you head to the office?
Whatever the reason, when not measured and
managed properly, employees’ lateness can cause businesses thousands of
dollars each year in lost productivity and profits.
To understand exactly how much lateness could cost your organisation, let’s
look at the example below.
Company ABC Pty Ltd has 150 employees.
10% of their workforce (15 employees) is persistently late for work by 10
minutes. Their average hourly pay is $25.00 p/h (10 minutes late represents $4.16)
Assuming there are 232 working days per year: 232 x 15 (late employees) x
$4.16 ($ lost due to lateness) = $14,476.80 lost per year
Combine that with the lost productivity, extra overtime costs occurred
when covering workload, and the order value of the contracts lost due to delays
in delivery, and you can clearly see how just a few minutes lateness can really
affect your bottom line.
So what can you do to address the issue? The Forum of Private Business
proposes the following below steps:
1. Set boundaries
Your staff needs to know what you expect from them, therefore a clear
lateness policy should be introduced and communicated across your workforce.
The policy should cover:
- The required standards of timekeeping, i.e. working hours, shift patterns, any flexi-time or flexible working arrangements
- Any consequences of persistent lateness
- What disciplinary action will be taken under the disciplinary procedure
- How your company will monitor time keeping, i.e. timesheets or clocking in machine
- If and how your staff will have to make up any time they have missed
- Who they should report lateness to if they know are going to be late and by when
2. Create a formal
procedure
The Forum suggests that persistent lateness can often be resolved informally
and the employee may be given an opportunity to improve.
This often proves to be a more effective way of resolving such an issue at
an early stage - highlighting potential problems that you can quickly address
and negating the need for an investigation and disciplinary meeting.
If after the informal action lateness continues to occur, it may create
grounds for a formal disciplinary procedure.
3. Be fair and
flexible
We’ve all been affected by unexpected events i.e. rail strikes, traffic
accidents or inclement weather, which can impact on the time taken to travel to
work.
Employers need to be realistic and understanding about occasional
unavoidable problems with getting to work. They should always listen to
employee’s reason for lateness, which may indicate problems concerning
management, working relationships and work hours.
Where possible companies should plan ahead and be open to changing shift
patterns, allowing temporary home-working or flexible working arrangements, if
appropriate.
How to effectively
monitor attendance and reduce the financial impact of Employee Tardiness
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if you monitor employees’ attendance and absence
patterns their overall presence rate will generally improve.
An automated Time and Attendance system can help reduce employee lateness
by effectively monitoring and analysing working time and absence patterns. I
for one know that if I have to register my attendance in the morning, I make
double sure I make it into the office on time!
An effective Time and Attendance system also allows you to set up specific
rules relating to your business operation. For example, you could set up a rule
whereby once a person arrives late to work by 7 minutes, the system rounds that
figure up to 15 minutes, meaning 15 minutes worth of pay will be reduced from
your employee’s salary.
Continue to our website to find out more information about automated Time andAttendance systems and absence management modules.
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