Employees Working Late... A Problem

Hi Seniors,
I am Jayashree, an HR executive and am facing a problem in my company. Lot of our employees stay back late, beyond office hours to complete their work. While staying back occasionally is understandable, staying back late everyday has become an issue- performance decreases, stress levels, etc are high. The worst that has happened is that employees here have a misconception that if they leave on time, they would be considered as under-performers.
Please let me know what measures can be taken to change this. Also, please help me with drafting a policy for leaving on time. What points do I put in the policy?
Looking forward to your help
Cheers,
Jayashree

Hi Jayashree,
You can call all the employees who are sitting late and tell them to stop this concept as it is disturbing other workforce,you may not be forcing them to stop from tomorrow as it is the only one force where you can have production rythm and morever you mat require this late sitting employees if time comes for that so treat them in such a way that they should understand what a HR want to deliver.
Please do the framework strongly with regards to this subect.
Regards,
Maruti G
Bangalore
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Dear Jayashree,

Employees work late for few reasons. These are (a) their boss likes it (b) working late is a part of organisation's culture (c) really employees are loaded with extra work and it is just impossible to complete it within specified working hours (d) their organisation promotes experiments of various kinds and to do these experiments, employees prefer working extra (e) organisation is too process-centric. In the bargain, the organisation has become too bureaucratic (f) organisation depends on off-shore customers. These off-shore customers keep on calling midnight also. To avoid their calls at home, employees prefer taking their calls at office itself.

However, for the reasons (b) and (c), you need to define the measures of productivity. As long you do not define measures of productivity we cannot make any conclusions.

As a curative measures, conduct a survey on why the employees work late. Find out which is the No 1 reason for working late. Later you can open meeting also and ask them to provide the solution. You can also find out is this late sitting because of Parkinson's Law.

Ok...

DVD

Dear Dinesh,
Thanks so much for your inputs. I will do a survey to get more specific answers..
But depending on the info that I gathered through grapevine is that managers themselves stay back late and work, which results in their team members staying late. And if anyone leaves on time- they are considered under-performers- 'She leaves on time because she's jobless' is the grapevine that goes around. what kind of steps do I take to put a stop to this rumors?
Regards
Jayashree

You can just take a seminar on time management and how work can be efficiently done within the timeframe, so that everyone understands that company do not entertain late sitting, but just good performance.
Best of luck Jayshree!
Regards,
Neetu

Dear Jayashree,

While replying to any post, please delete the comments of previous poster from that post. Lest it these may get repeated unnecessarily. Please check your previous two replies of this thread.

Ok. Coming to the point. Conduct the survey of the employees' attendance. Find out the following:

a) Total No of hours spent by all - as per office hours policy against actual hours spent by each employee

b) Average hours per employee per day

c) Which department has above average figure. Which department has below average figure.

d) Consumption of excess resources like electricity, water etc because of employees' late stay.

Show the above data to your MD or CEO. Obtain inputs from him/her and find out what he/she says.

If MD/CEO gives accent that people should quit in time, give target to each HOD to reduce their excess working hours by at least 10%. See the result. Let MD/CEO talk to the managers on unnecessary late sitting. Later, give the managers target to reduce the excess hours by at least 10%.

About grapevine I have given my reply in my previous post. Your organisation is victim of Parkinson's Law. Your managers can change this situation.

Ok...

DVD

Dear HR
This is a most common issue now-a-days in many industires, many people feel that working in late hours give them extra-edge or so called mileage over others.This is only a misconception and misleading thinking.
Every industry should have monitoring system of activities, targets,schedules given to employees (of course depending on nature of industry and thier business requirements ) this kind of system will help industires to recongize performers and nonperformers
Generally people who prefer to sit late after office hours are falling under non-performers of course, with an exemption rarely performers and semi-performers.
Define thier duties, goals and fix time schedules, this will solve the issue to some extent.
Also you can consider making a policy , but this will not help you much . Mainly top management 's commitment is required to tackle such issues in a profeesional way
thanks
Dakshina murty
Manager - HR

Hi ,
I m working in automobile sector late working is normal trend in our company.You can do only one thing, you can set the closing time of office above that time nobody is allowed to work just like in school.2nd thing u can do is that make a list of employee who work late, just go through their KRA and Job responsibility and ask them to make time table(What they do whole day time ise) and sit with their HOE or his immediate boss & discuss with his boss what minimum time he/she should take to do the work .Try to rectify the problem which take lot of time ,make the working process simple,easy & short.

In my opinion sitting late in office depends on their work means production of work only otherwise ask employees to stop the late sitting concept. generally late sitting employees will do less work and spending time leisurely.

Hi :
I have faced the same problem in one of my previous experience and this is what I did : Firstly I listed down all the names of the guys alongwith their department names who regulary go late, collected the data for one month and presented the same in the monthly senior management meeting in the presence of COO and CEO. After that I made the Manager's responsible to come with justifications for staying late and slowly the late sitting reduced. After 3 months, when the late sitting reduced to a very low level, I also brought in a rule that since the office closes at 06:30 p.m. all lights and AC will be switched off at 07:30 p.m. thus forcibly making people to exit latest by 07:30 p.m. It worked For me.
C. VENKATARAMANAN