Hi – I want to cure an increase in lateness in my team. More and more colleagues are coming in late to work and when they arrive don’t seem to think they should apologise and they go and hide at their desks. We have run a policy where employees can make up time if they are late, but as we are a B2B outbound teleresearch centre, the time they make up is not in a very productive period for us i.e.lunchtime. Because this is now getting out of hand, I want to curb it, as we see timekeeping as important to us and I was reading that punctuality is affective only in colleagues who are happy and loyal to the company; we use a mix of temporary and permanent colleagues in a 60/40 ratio. I am also happy that you may reply that as a line manager I have become complacent, which has caused this to escalate, but given the difficulties in recruiting into the environment over the last year I have allowed that to happen rather than curtail the contracts of some colleagues and so causing myself a manning level problem.

How best do I bring it back into line and are there any penalties for lateness and attendance that we can introduce that will “help” to cure our problem. I do recall in a past position that employees who were over 3 minutes late in the morning were docked 15 minutes pay, can this still be done?

Martyn McShane