Staff lateness - and blaming traffic.

[minghis]

Anyone else suffer from this excuse? Nearly every day someone turns up 10 - 15 minutes late and seems to think it's not their fault if "the traffic is bad".

They all live in the same town, there are roadworks going on, admittedly, but they are not life changing, just a bit more congestion than usual. Either they are incapable of finding an alternate route or they just can't figure out that they need to leave home a bit earlier.

I'm starting to firmly suggest they should leave earlier and am getting close to giving some verbal warnings, am I being reasonable or is bad traffic a legitimate excuse?

[minghis]

PurpleTurtle said:

Does your business depend on people being there from a certain time, or is it an arbitary start time because that is what it has always been? If the former, then an all staff email, followed by individual written warnings. If the latter, why not flex things up a bit?

This is a critical time for the staff member that is planned to be in at this time - they are driving a route to collect customers so unless they leave on time it causes knock on problems through the day.
So in reality it can't be flexible.

I think I simply need to nip it in the bud and say late is late, end of story.

[minghis]

All good stuff, and I'm pleased to see so many pages of comments. This particular job role is time critical as it involves collecting people at a given time, in reality a little bit like a bus driver or a taxi driver - it's all about time.

If this particular part of the business is late it does have a knock on effect for everyone else. Flexi time is all well and good where appropriate, but we open at a set time and shut at a set time and whilst we can cope with the non critical aspects of the job being flexible someone that is rota'd to do the pick ups should really get in on time especially as they only live a few miles away. The traffic is usually bad, it always is, but what is annoying is that they don't bother to leave a bit early and find a different route like I would...