How can I fairly implement a timeliness policy when some workers are on hourly pay and some on fixed salaries?

Question

I work in a small development team and we have members who are paid hourly and workers who are paid a salary. Recently, it's come to our attention that both the hourly and salary employees are taking advantage of the fact that tardiness was never hugely enforced, and after several attempts to fix that, it's time to put a policy into place.

That being said, we're having trouble coming up with a fair way to implement a policy for both kinds of workers. The hourly workers don't necessarily know which of their colleagues are on salary, and there's no reason to divulge that. One of the few perks of salary over hourly, though, is flexibility. I don't think it's fair to consider 9:01am late (or even after that), especially if the salary workers are staying later and/or working at home at times.

I think that is a fair policy for the hourly workers, but I can see backlash happening when they are questioned for their tardiness, while their peers aren't. What would a good way to handle this?

Answer 1

I think the underlying question is: can you implement two different policies without telling everyone which policy applies to each person?

I don't think you can, since the policy has visible effects.

After the policy you want to have two visibly different groups of people:

1. salaried staff with flexible hours
2. hourly staff with fixed start and end times

It's going to be obvious.

In my experience this has not been an issue. I've worked on both sides of that "divide", and I've not seen any problems. Is there some deeper reason why you don't want people to know who is hourly rather than salaried?

Answer 2

First any and all discussions about tardiness with individual employees should happen behind closed doors. Publicly addressing this type of issue is both disrespectful to the employee, and demoralizing to the staff, neither of which result in positive changes in the workplace.

A simple way handle the issue with salaried individuals showing up late is to enforce planned flex time. This means if a worker is going to be late and make up for it by working over they need to plan and advise management of this intent ahead of time.

You should also implement an excused tardiness policy. Occasionally things happen in the morning that can not be planned for. While this should be the exception rather than the rule there should be a policy in place that allows for a limited number of unplanned occurrences. These rules should be enforced uniformly among all staff. This will allow you to keep the fairness but allow for the flexibility you want to allow to your staff.

Answer 3

The only fair way to address this is with documentation stating that if employees are not assembled/working at the appointed time then they are late. The flexibility issue can also be addressed by documenting and filing on record when an employee requests such leniency, it also must address what an employee must do to compensate for any granted leniency. Lateness of employees must also be documented in order to have some weight on promotion or wage raise consideration.

The places I supervised at required that employees be on site 15 minutes prior to the start of their shift in order for them to log into a computer to check for any important messages or emails that were sent during their absence/off time. For non-salary folk this was not considered work and unpaid. For salary folk this was considered part of their salary contract.

No one needs to know or even care who is hourly or salary, but what is needed is a consistent document that covers all employees. Those that abuse/excessively request the flexibility of hours allowed by the policy that you document must also be informed of how their ratings will be affected.

Your goal should be to have employees conform to a unified system. That way there is no possibility of perceived bias nor favoritism. Any errant employee is to be presented with a cold hard text copy of policy documentation that addresses non-conformance of the policy and what result the employee can expect from supervision or the employer.

If you want results, once policy documentation is made and approved, distribute the policy to all that it covers and also hold a mandatory meeting to make sure all employees are aware of the policy going into effect. This way no one will be able to dispute that they were not aware of the change. It would also be a good idea to have each employee sign a printed copy of the document that way it will be solid evidence should someone try to sue with an argument of not being informed.