The feedback was more than just "Please be on time". It was proceeded by multiple statements on the impact of being late. The fact that you should be on time is obvious, but the impact of not being on time isn't always obvious.
Everyone responds to feedback differently. I'm personally a very direct person, and asking whats preventing me from being on time is just going to make me feel like you're talking down to me. Understanding why it's important is enough, let me be a big boy and figure out my own time management. Others hate being told what to do, and would prefer to work through a solution collaboratively.
Right, but if you find it obvious that one should be on time, yet you aren't, there are two possible explanations:
- You are trying to be on time and failing, in which case telling you to try harder is unlikely to help. There is an underlying cause for your involuntary tardiness that must be addressed; or
- You are intentionally disregarding being on time, because something has made you think that is acceptable. There is an underlying cause to your voluntary tardiness that must be addressed.
Either way, people generally have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and willingly ignoring this reason is generally ineffective at provoking change.
If you want to go the Joel Spolsky, "managing software teams is psychotherapy" route, then two other questions are
"why do you dread coming to work"
and
"what were you working on that distracted you from the time?"
Being late to (most kinds of) meeting while preventing a production outage, or helping another team, should not just be allowed, it should be respected.
This one I think happens more often than people think. And if you keep sending the message that your meeting is more important than the health of the company, well, eventually you're going to get what you asked for.
It's not at all obvious. People respond to incentives, look at the incentives given by switching them around:
- "When you are on time for meetings, you have to spend more time in the meeting". The attendee likely didn't have any say in the agenda items, and isn't interested in many/all of them. Because the meetings apparently still finish on time (as they have less time for the agenda items), they neither overrun nor get rescheduled, this could be Parkinson's Law of work expands to fit the time available. It's not clear "less time to spend on agenda items" is a problem, it is clear that "less time in meetings" is desirable.
- "When you are on time, the team will trust you to be on time". That isn't any incentive for anything; "the team will expect you to be on time proportionally to how often you are on time" is no statement at all.
- "It inconveniences the team". Allegedly; they all still spend the same amount of time in the meeting either way. The lateness means there is less time for the items, not that the meeting overruns or is rescheduled. Perhaps, scheduling too long for the meeting is inconveniencing the team more, but being late for a meeting which can still do what it planned, is no inconvenience.
- "The team will trust you more". This may incentivize people, but it a) isn't obviously true; the team may respect you more for being busy, or b) wish they could do the same. If it is true, it's not obvious that it's bad - it may be that it means they won't invite you to more meetings (hooray), or they won't dump work on you trusting you to get it done (hooray). It apparently doesn't mean the employee is being fired, which is an odd way to respond to an employee you don't trust.
Paraphrasing a tweet I can't find now from a fictional manager perspective: "It's difficult to find a time for a meeting which suits every attendee. Easier to choose a time myself. Please make every effort to attend". Is the employee late because meetings are scheduled at a particularly bad time for them? It isn't obvious that the meeting is, or should be, the employee's top priority.
"When you are late, nothing happens except you hear an earful of status signalling by people who were on time"; that's not going to change anything, is it?
The next sentence should have been, "What is preventing you from being on time?" Or something like it.