The Glade 4.0

I work in a hospital so the situation may vary from other jobs, but they are serious about being on time (real emergencies notwithstanding), the previous shift has to leave, and without gaps in patient care. If I have been at work all night, you can certainly drag your *** in on time. I have 3 coworkers who live across in another state and they make it on time better then some of the asses who live close by.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Obviously, for shift work it matters.

Hannibal,

Explain why managing engineering projects from 8:45 to 7PM makes my job less important than if I were doing it 8-5?

Yeah, when it's not an issue of shift changes or being open for customer-facing business, my philosophy is that if my employer wants to demand that I'm in on-time to the minute or whatever, then I can start my day early (and leave accordingly early or be paid OT).

If I have to devote my off-hours time to be there early, I'm going to work and get paid for it. The notion of arriving half an hour ahead of time for a job with fixed workloads that either gets done or doesn't, and having to twiddle my thumbs or waste time on the internet or whatever before I'm allowed to "clock in" is just as disrespectful to me as vice versa.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Something to remember about (some) call centers...

(In the case of 'outsourced' call centers), they are often contractually obligated to have a certain number of "skillsets" (trained bodies) in seats at any given time.

Gladly.

I'll say youre the on site PM for say an industrial HVAC sub contractor. Your posted hours are 8-5pm. I have a lift I have to do today to get my chiller unit up on a 3rd story tower. Crane is on site, and I have my delivery set to 8:30. Most places like Merck, PECO, Wyeth etc require you to sign off on the lift the day of. Completely unnecessary but one of those layers of crap they like to toss.

I go to your trailer to get you to look at the setup and the workzone, and .... errr where is he?

Ok delivery is here. Crap I've got to go inspect it. Um ok Joe you hang here with the paperwork until Arath gets here.
"White hat guy" - no you can't put that boom up in the air till the tag is signed off on.
Riggers- Ok nothing for us to do, we are going for coffee.

Arath wanders in 45 minutes late. Joe is on coffee break. Finally all the cats get herded into the same room, job gets inspected and the paperwork signed. Now we've got to hurry the F up and get that unit on the roof before lunch, or I've got to beg the guys to work through lunch. Oh the union BA is on site? Crap. Wait we only rented the crane a half day cause this was supposed to be in the air by 10? Delay of job fine by the Proj Mang company?


and the snowball goes from there. Your lateness causes a ripple effect that costs time, money and affects more people down the chain who were depending on you. All because you were supposed to be there, ready for work at 8. Not 8:45.


An extreme case, and we both know 90% of the time we dont' even know if youre in the office or not.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Come on, we all know this is irrelevant. Whether you can be late or not depends on how valuable you are to the company and how well you are performing. They're not going to shitcan their top sales guy or whatever just because he's an hour late every day. If you're top on sales, you can show up to work drunk and anyone who gives you **** about it will themselves be fired.

Personally, I think it takes a fantastic amount of arrogance to claim that anyone that violates any of a list of totally arbitrary rules that you yourself make up, even slightly, is automatically disqualified from being a good employee or having a good work ethic. Some guy might put in 15 hours a day, but because he comes in at 8:15 he's a shitty worker and should be fired? Please.

It's pretty telling that only people on the low end of the income spectrum have punctuality rigidly enforced. Everyone I know of that makes $100k+ in their jobs comes and goes as they please. If they want to get some work done at home and go in at 11 am without telling anyone, they do it.

I'm never late. The moment it appears that I won't be where I'm expected to be when I'm expected to be there, I call and realign the expectations.

Do that as a matter of course and you can get away with murder.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Telling that they seem to have a job that isn't dependant on them being in a specific location at a specfic time. However, are we really going to say the fry cook is going to have the same perks as the 100k income guy? Most of the blue collar guys I know in that bracket still don't come and go as they please. If part of your job is being ready to work at a certain location at a certain time, then be there. And I think as your job scales up, and more folks become dependant on your work to get theirs done, your ability to be on time is even more important.

But it is what it is. My reasons for being on time are selfish. Others do it out of a sence of pride or duty. YMMV.

_________________
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

I don't disagree with that, but this is what you said before:



You said nothing about job performance or other people's effectiveness being dependent on your punctuality. You just said everyone who is chronically late should be fired, without exception.

Are you chronically late? Those are who I am discussing. So for the sake of the derailed topic from homegrown terrorists Ill continue that.

if your work isnt time sensetive, or if noone else relys on your presence to accomplish their work, and your employer doesnt care- then rock on. Of course youre not who is being discussed here.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Some people have set office hours and some don't. I'd wager the people who don't still have appointments and and meetings they have to be on time for or suffer consequence.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

There is a very important classification that defines the systems that you have overlooked, that isn't related to their income levels. Its that classification that causes a lot of the problems here.

That's retarded. If I'm managing the job, I know where I have to be and when. If I'm an onsite construction manager, 8-5 is not acceptable. 24/7 is the only thing that is acceptable. I have a cell phone, and backup personnel, and a foreman that I coordinate with. Furthermore, if I'm managing the site, that delivery was scheduled and/or approved by ME - so I know it's coming.

If I'm managing an office and/or job site that is so tightly controlled that work stops when a specific individual is not present, then I'm a terrible manager and should be fired. Every position has someone covering it.

Oh, yeah. Of course.

Honestly, I am, but my tendency for tardiness depends entirely on the circumstances. For instance, in my current job, unless there's something specific scheduled, there's no real start time, but people do expect you'll be in your office sometime in the 9:30-10:00 range. Still, if someone's looking for you at 10:15 and you happen to be running late that day, no big deal. As a result, my normal arrival time is 10:00 +/- 10 minutes depending on how long the line at Starbucks was, whether or not I caught the early ferry/subway, etc. On the other hand, if there's a conference call scheduled at, say, 2:00pm, I'll be dialed-in no later than precisely 2:00pm, because when you have partners and clients with hectic schedules (and partner billing rates around $1k/hour), you definitely do not keep them waiting on hold while you get yourself a cup of coffee!

In my personal life, if I'm meeting a friend at their house to hang out, I'm invariably 15-20 minutes late (though I always call to let them know), and I don't think it's a big deal because they're just chilling at home in the meantime. On the other hand, if I'm meeting them at the subway station or somewhere else where they'll be standing around waiting, then I make every effort to be on time.

I guess what I'm saying is that when punctuality matters for substantive reasons, I'm all for it, but when it's just enforced for its own sake or treated like some kind of proxy for seriousness/quality regardless of the circumstances, I see it as arbitrary and unnecessary. I prefer a more relaxed approach where XX:00 means XX:00 +/- a bit, provided there's no real need for precision.

This.

There are obviously time sensative jobs out there, where punctuality absolutely matters. Being a store/business opener is one of those jobs. So Hannibals example where the guy opening up the gym got there at 4:30 when the place was supposed to open instead of earlier so that everything was ready to open at 4:30 is wrong. However the jobs that RD and I seem to have there isn't anything specifically going on right at our "start times", it's more project work where the time sensative issues are meetings and deadlines, and you work whatever hours you need, whenever to make those happen. It's also quite often that the type of work that RD and I do is salaried vs hourly, and as any salaried employee will tell you you work far more than the 40 hours that your salary is based on. It is generally accepted that one of the compensations for that is some flexibility with your schedule so that you are able to independantly manage your time so long as the work of the day and commitments are being made.

Personally, I've worked both. I've been in positions where you needed to be ready to go right at your start time, and in those jobs punctuality is very important and it's supremely annoying to have someone who's habitually late working there. Similarly in those positions where your start/stop time isn't as crucial but those meetings and deadlines are, people who are there every day right at 8am but also leave right at 5pm but aren't able to get to meetings on time or get their deadlines completed on time are just as annoying.