Are you constantly dealing with late employees? Do your workers saunter in after the workday has begun, offering up excuses like car problems, traffic backups on the Irish highways, and sick children?
While arriving late once in a while is fine, as things happen that are out of your worker’s control when arriving late becomes a habit, you have a problem on your hands. Some employees just can’t make it to work on time because of who they are.
For others, it’s a cultural issue. You need to not only understand your worker’s motivations when it comes to punctuality but also know how to enforce the need to get to the office on time.
Is It a Cultural Issue?
Arriving habitually late falls into two lines of thought. Some employees are just consistently late. It’s in their nature. They wake up late, fail to leave early enough, and then arrive at the office past their typical clock in time.
In other cases, the employee is late because their culture is one of more flexibility.
For example, workers that came to Ireland from countries that aren’t as industrialized just aren’t used to having to work a strict schedule. Their culture is more free-thinking and less structured. This means that they are used to working the hours that they wish to work, and as long as everything gets done, there isn’t much to worry about in their eyes.
This is quite contradictory to the typical Irish working culture, which requires people to work a strict set of hours.
What Can You Do?
When it comes to dealing with non-punctual workers, there are some options. Many of them involve working with the employee or finding other ways to track the time that they work. Let’s go over some of them here.
Train Your Managers to Work with the Employees
Thanks to the influx of workers to Ireland from other countries, some cross-cultural training is required. This training teaches your managers how to adapt and work alongside those employees from less industrialized nations. The better your managers understand them, the more productive everyone will be.
In this particular example, that involves not writing up those workers or lecturing them every time that they are late. This just takes up time that could be better spent on other things. Instead, you might want to set up flexible schedules for your employees.
As long as they can use a good time tracking solution program to log their hours and they get all of their work done, it makes sense to allow them to keep a more flexible schedule. (Note that you may need to adjust the schedules for your traditional employees as well since it’s only fair if everyone gets to set their hours. As long as everyone adheres to Irish working laws, this will be okay.)
Make Sure That Your Written Policies Are Followed
If you don’t want to adjust your worker’s schedules accordingly, then your next option to enforce those written policies. You more than likely have some policies in place regarding punctuality and timekeeping.
Once your employees break those policies, you’ll need to write them up, punish them, dock their hours, or, if the problem worsens and they don’t show any signs of improvement, let them go. All of this needs to be written out clearly in your policy manual.
Make your employees review this section after their first offense and then have them sign a piece of paper stating that they have done so. Place that form in their HR file. This way you have recourse should they continue running late every morning. It helps you enforce Irish labor laws, as well.
Use Time Tracking Software
There are many different options out there when it comes to time tracking software. Some of these programs are far more sophisticated than others, such as the ones that use biometrics instead of traditional logons. You have your choice of which ones to use.
Not only do these programs make things easier for you, as they allow your managers to see which client tasks their employers are working on, as well as help them track days off, but they also ensure that your employees are in place and at work when they need to be. You can set them up in numerous ways in order to make the system work best for you.
As you can see, there are several ways to ensure that your employees arrive at work on time. You can either work with them and adjust your expectations to their cultural norms or make them adjust to keeping the set hours of a traditional Irish work day. An additional option involves using time tracking software.
All are valid, and you’ll need to choose the method that works best for you.