A reader writes:

I work at a nonprofit that operates in a very traditional office setting: business professional dress code, strict lunch hours, and a strict 9-5 day. In theory, this is done for efficiency and to allow employees to feel like they have more separation between their work and personal life. New staff tend to struggle with it when they first arrive since many other nonprofits they have worked for are more flexible about arrival times, making up time, PTO, etc.

As operations manager, I’m the one who constantly sends out the reminders to staff about office policies, hours among them. Since I started in 2014, we go through a cycle: an email reminder that we work 9-5 so please be here ready to work by 9 a.m. goes out, it helps for about a month, and then folks begin to slide back into being 5, 10, 15 minutes late. For example, two weeks ago I addressed this problem in person and asked staff to plan their commutes accordingly. This morning, two-thirds of the staff were missing when work started at 9 a.m.

On the one hand, commuting in our area can be unpredictable; traffic, mass transit, weather, all play their part in turning a typical 30-minute commute into an hour and a half battle. On the other hand, the people who are late are chronically late, and always for the same reason (metro, traffic, weather). The president is the particular stickler for this rule (though he himself is rarely on time), and among senior management there is now a discussion about setting up a new system to punish people for being late.

I do not want to go down that route. We’ve had some staffing issues recently and I know that our inflexible office policies are directly related to people leaving. What alternatives can I suggest that will both enforce our policy but not punish the staff, especially when other members of senior management can’t seem to follow it?

Why not suggest changing the policy?

Obviously if strict arrival times are truly necessary to the work of the organization, you shouldn’t do that — but if they’re not, you should encourage your management team to revisit why they’re so committed to the current policy.

Well-run organizations keep the focus on results, and they try to give employees as much flexibility as they reasonably can. That’s part of how they attract and retain good employees, and it’s how they build cultures that care about results over appearances. And you might point out that you’re competing for good employees against organizations that are increasingly giving people this kind of flexibility.

You could also point out that if they’re committed to this rule but can’t point to any real job-related needs for it, then it’s really, really not helping matters that the president is simultaneously insisting on the rule while ignoring it himself. That’s a good way to create a culture where people are cynical about the leadership and don’t see integrity as a particularly high organizational value. Bad things come from that.

However, if the work actually does require strict arrival times, then you need to change the way you’re enforcing the policy. Stop with the all-staff emails. They’re not working, and they’re a pretty weak way of addressing this. Instead, managers need to be responsible for ensuring that their staff arrive on time and addressing it with them directly if they’re not, just like they would with any other performance concern.

And that should be easy to do, because if the work really does require people to be there precisely by 9, then there should be work-related impacts that managers can point to — like “your client was left waiting for 15 minutes this morning” or “Jane was pulled away from her own work because she had to keep answering your phone” or “you missed a crucial team meeting this morning” or whatever the impact was.

But it should be coming from their managers, not you.