Do Not Be Like the Late Ms. W.

Career tip: never be late…to the workplace or to meetings or for assignment deadlines.

Ms. W.’s name has been abbreviated to protect the guilty. She is not “late” as in “dead,” but “late” as “almost never on time.”

We have nurses around-the-clock for my beloved wife, Tina Su Cooper. Each nurse must stay until the next one arrives. The “reliable” Ms. W. has been reliably five to ten minutes late for her two or three shifts each week, for most of the years she has worked for us. Otherwise, she does well. I did not much mind her tardiness, and I expected peer pressure from the other nurses to discourage this or, better yet, to end it. Unfortunately, despite her New Year’s resolution in 2010, she quickly lapsed back to her peculiar form of “reliability,” reliably late.

Taking my own advice from my October 2012 www.asiancemagazine.com column on managing employees, I sat Ms. W. down recently and told her that, while she is a fine nurse in many ways, her lateness was a serious deficiency and had to stop. I explained that she was taking advantage of me and of the nurses who had to stay longer because she so often came a bit late. The nurses who work from 10PM to 8AM, when Ms. W. is scheduled to relieve them, understandably do not want to put in extra time waiting for her. I could not be sure that Ms. W. would be on the job until she actually arrived.

Furthermore, five to ten minutes several times per week adds up to at least an hour per month…did she want me to deduct that from her pay? No! Nor did I want to. Neither the other nurses nor I wanted to be petty. We just wanted punctuality.

I explained to Ms. W. that she was part of a team and that she had to uphold her responsibilities, a little like being in a relay race, where her teammate cannot run until Ms. W. passes the baton to her.

Another point I made was that often the quality of the performance of a job is hard to appraise, but whether it was on time is easy to measure…look at the clock or the calendar. It is foolishness to let laxity in meeting deadlines undercut one’s perceived performance.

People who are late habitually, and I went through a period of this myself, find excuses for each instance and seem not to see that they have fallen into a pernicious pattern. Don’t be that employee! My own boss once told me that on-time arrival was a “condition of employment,” meaning I could get fired for not meeting it. It did not matter that I often stayed much later, giving the company more than the scheduled hours per day. The boss likes to know you will be there as needed, not when you decide to be there.

You would think I would never be late, having lost a near-certain scholarship to one of the USA’s best engineering schools by submitting my scholarship application a few days after the deadline. I have taken deadlines very seriously since then, but starting times for my industrial research position did not seem to be the same as deadlines. I was wrong.

Back to Ms. W. She listened attentively, did not try to defend the indefensible. She apologized, promised to do much better, and so far has done so. She also did not get sulky and act as though she should not be criticized. If she continues to arrive on time, she will have handled the situation perfectly. If not….

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Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., a retired environmental physicist, is married to Tina Su Cooper, a former editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica and mother of two. Tina is the central figure in his book, Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or through their website, tingandi.com.