Chronic Tardiness

[Tweety]

We waiting for a nurse to float from another floor this morning because we had two call ins. She was 25 minutes late. We bowed down at her feet "oh thank goodness you're here". She's 'sorry I'm late'. Earlier I had called her floor where they said "she's always late".

Have we created due to the nursing shortage an environment where tardiness is tolerated because we are greatful they even show up? Seem so at this hospital that tardiness is tolerated. The people don't even seem to have an excuse or care, they just want the hours to be 7:15 instead of 6:45. Of course they usually are the ones chomping at the bits to go home on time.

So the question is, what is your policy on tardiness. Is it enforced. Have we created a culture of mediocrity in nursing because of the "shortage"?

[LIFESAVERLINDA]

I was fired for chronic tardiness just 4 days ago from a job i truly loved,i worked as an er nurse in one of nations busiest er,i hardly ever called in unless i was very sick.my problem is we are supposed to clock in at 6:51pm after that you are considered late. not everyday but alot of the time i would clock in by 6:53 or 6:52 never later than 6:55pm, we are not out of shift report until 7pm-7:10pm,so never was a nurse waiting on me to be relieved. we get out of report and then go meet up with whoever we are taking over for, and then have have another report off going is supposed to clock out by 7:15pm. in addition there are many other nurses who have just as many if not more than me and are not being fired. i truly believe that one of the nurse managers didnt like me and had it in for me. of course i cant prove it. but strangley enough the day before she was made interim unit manager. i feel like damn was that her first order of business to get me out? i want to appeal it,but they are just gonna say she was warned yada yada. realistically yes i was tardy but not so tardy that it affected my job. and why are they holding me to a higher standard and not everybody else...any suggestions would be greatly appreciated:o

[LydiaNN]

We've got a lady where I work who claims that it is part of her culture not to respect timelines. Seriously, she claims that people where she is from are always late. Well, big whoop. You're here now, sister, and you're holding me up. Plus, we have a number of other people in our agency that are of the same ethnicity and they manage to be where they're supposed to, when they're supposed to be there.

[traumaRUs, MSN, APRN]

This is an old thread (2003) but I still feel if you are late, you don't need to work with me! Even one or two minutes late is disrespectful and I take it as my time is less valuable than the tardy ones.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

i was fired for chronic tardiness just 4 days ago from a job i truly loved. . .i truly believe that one of the nurse managers didnt like me and had it in for me. of course i cant prove it. but strangley enough the day before she was made interim unit manager. i feel like damn was that her first order of business to get me out? i want to appeal it,but they are just gonna say she was warned yada yada. realistically yes i was tardy but not so tardy that it affected my job. and why are they holding me to a higher standard and not everybody else...any suggestions would be greatly appreciated:o

consider this. it's possible that your interim unit manager was put in place because the previous manager wasn't doing what she was supposed to do. she's probably following direction from her new boss. maybe her don is like the one i worked for (see next paragraph).

when i was a nurse manager at a 200 bed acute hospital our don was very strict with us managers about keeping track of anyone who was tardy or absent. so, every two weeks when we prepared our unit's time cards before sending them to payroll we were to check for late clock-ins just like yours. there was some elaborate rule in place that you could have so many tardys in a one year period, etc. just to make sure we were doing this, she had one of her nursing coordinators do spot checks of the time cards to make sure we were keeping track of this stuff. i felt bad for employees like you who clocked in one or two minutes past the grace time. i had no choice, but to follow the policy of the hospital or the don would be breathing down my neck. there was a verbal warning, then two written warnings and, finally, a warning of termination and if they were tardy after that, they were terminated. she did this because she was a stickler about everyone having to follow the rules, no exceptions. i'm sure you've heard complaints where people wonder how come they got reprimanded for doing something that is against the rules while everyone else was getting away with it. not in this dons hospital!

set your clocks ahead to buy you some time. my mother always kept the clocks in our house set five minutes ahead. of course, once you get used to that you look at the clock, it says 5 o'clock, but you know it's really only 4:55!

if you know your clock in is going to be late, don't clock in and have a manager sign it after you've lied to her and told her you forgot to clock in. after you do this more than once or twice in a pay period it gets real suspicious though.

i, personally, always made it a point to be at my job 15 minutes before clock in time. if i had been you i would have put in my mind that i needed to be at work at 6:30.

i'm sorry you lost your job over this.

[JentheRN05, RN]

While in nursing school - if you were late for a clinical, you were sent home for the day. You miss two clinicals and you get a clinical fail. Instill these values during their education and they will stick. They did in my case. I was only late 1 time during my entire education of 3 years. You guessed it, I was sent home.

[night owl]

We have the chronic late staff members also, but on my unit on the dayshift, we have the 30 minute late comers. When they come to the unit they just check themselves in on the time schedule and they get paid for not even being there. Then they walk into report with a breakfast sandwhich and a cup of coffee in their hands and proceed to have their breakfast. If that is not an arrogant attitude, I don't know what is. The old time head nurses would have never put up with this garbage. Nothing is ever done as usual and after a two week pay period, these people get paid for roughly 5 hours of not even being there! By letting this happen the facility is just wasting money day in and day out.

I'm replying to my own post. I posted this in March and has anything changed? Nope, still coming in 30 min late and checking himself in as if he came in on time time. I would love to have the money he was paid for not being here from March up until today! Now he's getting more bold. On the weekends he's at least an hour late every Saturday he has to work and if we have three nurses due in and two are LPN's, an Rn has to stay until he arrives. The night RN gets OT just waiting for him. After the night RN leaves, he checks himself in as being on time. Other nurses have pointed this out to the night supervisor a few times and she/he has docked him for the hour he was late.The thing is, it's still ALLOWED to continue. No verbal counselings, no written counselings, no anything. So it's not his fault he's always late, it's managements fault for allowing him to be chronically late, every single day. I find this absolutely unbelievable that no one has the spine to reprimand him and he's not even one of better nurses. It's the better nurses who always seem to be reprimanded for piddly things. I can only come to one conclusion and that is at this point, I suppose I will never understand it. :selfbonk: So LifesaverLinda, Here's a solution to your problem...come work at my facility. They don't give a darn if you're late. :)

[caroladybelle, BSN, RN]

I was fired for chronic tardiness just 4 days ago from a job i truly loved,i worked as an er nurse in one of nations busiest er,i hardly ever called in unless i was very sick.my problem is we are supposed to clock in at 6:51pm after that you are considered late. not everyday but alot of the time i would clock in by 6:53 or 6:52 never later than 6:55pm, we are not out of shift report until 7pm-7:10pm,so never was a nurse waiting on me to be relieved. we get out of report and then go meet up with whoever we are taking over for, and then have have another report off going is supposed to clock out by 7:15pm. in addition there are many other nurses who have just as many if not more than me and are not being fired. i truly believe that one of the nurse managers didnt like me and had it in for me. of course i cant prove it. but strangley enough the day before she was made interim unit manager. i feel like damn was that her first order of business to get me out? i want to appeal it,but they are just gonna say she was warned yada yada. realistically yes i was tardy but not so tardy that it affected my job. and why are they holding me to a higher standard and not everybody else...any suggestions would be greatly appreciated:o

If you truly loved the job, why were you repeatedly tardy?

If shift starts at 1845, you should be on the floor, clocked in, changed out, with your assignment and ready to go with pen in hand at 1845. If they are kind enough to give you leeway for it to be set by 1851, you definitely have no excuse to be late.

And whether you know it or not, people are inconvenienced when you show up late. If I and my fellow nurses am ready to hear taped report at 1845, and we get held up on a daily basis by one person dashing in only 6-10 minutes late regularly, it gets annoying and is a waste of our time. Thus, it is very disrespectfully and wasteful of others' time.

It doesn't matter how many other people do it, you got warned and fired for it.

[elthia]

Right now I'm on medical leave, but I can't stand tardiness in my coworker's, especially the oncoming shift, or when the RN I walk rounds with tries to do a COMPLETE physical assessment on ALL the patients, when I'm only paid for 15 minutes for walking rounds. At first it wasn't so bad, but when my medical condition got painful to the point where I was literally in tears from the pain, and all I wanted was to go home so I could take my pain meds it was all I could do to keep from yelling at the oncoming staff. Of course my facility would not give OT, because I did not notify the supervisor an hour before my shift ended that I would have to stay over, I never notified the supervisor because no one notified me that my relief would be late.. I wrote a note to my manager that I added it up and it comes to 65-130 hours of UNPAID OT a year due to someone else's unprofessionalism, and I am going to keep careful documentation of the hours I work when I return.

[DeLySh]

Do the chronic latecomers take credit on their timecards for the time they missed by being late and/or going home on time?

I still work in the non-medical field while in school and this would be considered timecard fraud and/or theft which would warrant termination without remedial action. What prevents their supervisors from taking exception to this behavior? Is this not a reflection of their leadership?

I guess I still just don't understand.

DeLySh

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

I can't stand tardiness in my coworker's, especially the oncoming shift, or when the RN I walk rounds with tries to do a COMPLETE physical assessment on ALL the patients, when I'm only paid for 15 minutes for walking rounds.

Oh, the walking rounds problems. I had a nurse do that to me. I told her one time when she just couldn't pull herself away from the patient to do her assessment that if she was going to insist on doing her work instead of getting report I was going to just go on and leave. She must not have been listening. On the next patient she started to do her thing, so I just quietly walked away. I went to the nurses station, sat down and waited. In a few minutes the nurse came looking for me asking why I had left. I told her I thought she was finished with walking rounds. She kind of blinked and looked at me. We finished rounds in 10 minutes. She never did that to me again.

[Sherri RN]

In my career whenever I've been chronically late there was a nurse on the unit who I worked with or relieved who I felt threatened by. I started being on time when I realized how I was feeling and when I realized I was being irrational. I'd rather get up early, eat, play with my dogs, go to work, get off work on time, get home on time, take my dogs for a walk, get back to sleep on time, get up early, and have a pleasant overall routine than get to work late, beat myself up over being late all morning, work hard playing catch up all day, be stuck after my shift still catching up, get home late, waste time calming anxious dogs, get to sleep late, worry about someone else's attitude at work, not be able to sleep, oversleep, be late to work, and start the negative late cycle all over again. I take care of the little things that mean so much, too. I get new mattresses every ten years so I sleep great, and I take my allergy medicine regularly so I sleep instead of snore from a stuffed up nose. I also got into my 30s and lost interest in partying, drinking, etc. It's easier to be hung over regularly, feel irrational about someone at work, not want to work, be distracted, and not have a routine when you're abusing alcohol.

[SEOBowhntr]

The problem here lies in MANAGEMENT!!!! Most facilities have tardiness policies, but few enforce them. This is a societal problem, even in the military now, 5 minutes late is "acceptable." I also work with one of those "chronic late" types, and had one that worked for me, until I lowered the hammer. Now the employee that works directly for me is one time everyday, the other "Chronic" one is still almost always late. Until society itself stops "accepting" the "fashionably late" style, this problem will never be fixed. If you're manager allows this "Chronic Tardiness" even after warning these type of people, they are a . As professionals, we should always be 5-15 minutes early, not late.