How to Handle Employees Who Are Always Late

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All employees will be late sometime, they are only human after all, but habitually late employees are a problem. Some of the bizarre excuses given by employees for being late as reported to SHRM Online and to a CareerBuilder survey include:

• It was pie day so I was baking

• A police officer was following me all the way to work so I had to drive slower than normal.

• I thought it was Saturday. 

• My wife was ovulating and we are desperate to have a baby

• A squirrel had babies in the attic

This raises the whole excuse issue.  In times past someone who worked for me for over three years told me the reason she didn’t record information in the CRM was that she must need more training.  As leaders, we know that training is our responsibility so my first thought was “Oh it is my fault, I need to get her more training.” And then having read The Oz Principle, I thought “Maybe this is an accountability issue.”

See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It.  Talk above the line with Ownership, Accountability, and Responsibility not below the line with Blame, Excuses, and Denial;  these are the basics of The Oz Principle. Excuses are just a way of not being accountable for your actions.  This is a culture issue within organizations.  It is our job as leaders to teach our employees to get out of the blame game, to stop using excuses, to solve the problems and just do it.

Think about it when you get your next excuse.  One of my favorite retorts is to say: “someone is going to be here on time; I hope it is you.”