What do I talk about when I talk about being late?

As a project manager, a large portion of my working day is spent on meetings since I need to work with different stakeholders such as internal team, clients and vendors. From my experience, a few people who keep showing up late in the meeting regardless online or offline meetings, it is like their pattern. I started to wonder the impacts of being late on individual’s image and organization’s culture. This article is indicated to help my team and my audience in understanding the broad view of being late so we can adjust if it relates and be better together as a person and as a team member.

We must admit that being late is impolite because it wastes others’ time. The one who are late for 5 minutes of the 10 attendees meeting, it already wastes 50 minutes. The one who keeps showing up late for every meetings, they must think their time is more important than everyone else in the room. Occasionally, it requires to summary or explain what has been presented or discussed to him one more time, which again consumes others’ time.

If the late comer is the meeting facilitator or a manager, it surely give a bad impression to the business partners and their staffs. As a manager, one are supposed to lead by setting good examples, manager has certain influence on the staff way of working either positively or negatively. It could create a detrimental effect on the company’s culture because nobody values punctuality. Consequently, all meetings are likely to start late because almost everyone show up late, people can totally assume that it’s a norm which is a dangerous.

Once being late in meeting without getting any correction from colleagues or managers, it can easily become a habit. This habit could ruin the respectful relationship between colleagues. How? Giving one employee is always on time and another is usually a few minutes late in every meeting. Thus, it is ingrained in the on-time employee that another is wasting their time or not showing the respect for them. As time goes by, these wrongdoings accumulate, it may lead to the consequence that on-time employee may hold a grudge against another one. The case would not always happen in that direction but it is totally possible when the workplace has no culture of giving constructive feedback, especially at peer level.

Being late is just a small mistake but with the butterfly effect it could create vicious cycle of negative impact on individuals and organizations. Thus, knowing the symptoms, we as individual or company’s management could create the cure for it early. A few things I could suggest are:

1/ Understand the actual reasons.

There should be specific reasons for being late often, for instance, incorrect estimate on the commute time or take lots of time to get ready. Whatever the reasons are, if we are able to identify it, we can develop a plan to prevent it.

2/ Start the day with a plan.

It could become a good habit if we spend a few minutes in the morning to plan what are our agenda today, what we are going to achieve and how we are going to do it. Plan a day can bring lots of benefits but giving a simple example as, we have back to back meetings, therefore, planning in advance help us to manage the first one not to get extended.

3/ Keep in mind why being punctual is important.

It is the respect we show to others and company’s culture. It is the protection of our own reputation. It is the overall efficiency that we bring to our life and the entire of organization.

P/S: The article may sound harsh and intolerance because we are humans and make mistake. In reality, I am still running late on this and that meeting sometimes. Nevertheless, we do not need to be perfect to talk about the right thing. Hence, I am spreading my thoughts so we could get a little better every day as a whole.

Thank you Uyên Trần for the graphic design.