my employee has been forgetting to punch in/out for four years

A reader writes:

I work in a state government office environment, managing six employees, all 100% on-site. All of us are salaried but still have to clock in and out. In the four years I’ve been here, one of my team often just … doesn’t. Sometimes every day in a two-week pay period has at least one missing punch in or out. For the first few years I sent her a message every two weeks telling her to add a punch on this day, on that day, add three hours of PTO on this day, etc. I ran a report and found that over the past year, I had to correct or add punches to around 35% of the total days worked.

She tells me she “forgets,” and yet she can tell me the exact time down to the minute because she texts her boyfriend right when she arrives or departs. So, she can remember to do that but not clock in, I suppose. It’s either that excuse or that her phone/computer suddenly drops signal and it doesn’t go through. No one else has had this issue.

It’s not a problem for me to correct a missed punch here and there, and I have no suspicion that she’s not actually getting to work when she says she is, but it’s incredibly irritating to go to approve her timesheet and see that there’s a missed punch on every. Single. Day. Payroll hasn’t said anything about it but I’m sure it doesn’t look great for an employee to have so many timesheet corrections.

I’ve talked to her about this issue and how serious it is multiple times, and things will improve for a few weeks, but then we’re back to where we started. Clocking in and out is literally the bare minimum of having a job. Any suggestions?

Tell her to set daily reminders for every morning and every evening and show you that she’s done it, and then spot-check for the next month to see if it’s working. If it’s not, as soon as you notice that, tell her she needs to come up with a better system and to report back to you the following day with what system she’s decided on. Ask her to check in with you weekly to report how it’s going and to put those check-in’s on the calendar right now.

That might all seem like overkill, but the reason she doesn’t think it’s that serious is because even though you’re saying it is, you’ve let it continue for four years … which conveys that it’s not really that serious. When you’ve coached an employee repeatedly to do something and it’s not happening, you need to decide how serious the issue truly is, whether it warrants consequences, and, if it does, what those consequences should be. Sometimes “you’re going to get an annoying level of scrutiny from me until this is fixed” (i.e., the paragraph above) is enough; that may or may not be the case here. But you need to decide what those consequences are and then implement them.

Also, how’s the rest of her work? If she’s otherwise a good employee, I’d be more willing to invest time in paragraph one to get the habit changed than if she’s not — and if she’s not, you need to start drilling down into those other issues.

Related:
what consequences can managers enforce, other than firing someone?

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