Not so for a House of Commons (HCC) cleaner who was dismissed for her tardiness. As my family will vouch, I struggle with timings but Ms Tijani's lateness was well beyond my best endeavours! She was late for work on 17 out of 20 days during December 2017. In April 2018 she was given a final written warning for her lack of timekeeping but then continued to be late a further 43 times over the next nine months. That's a level of greatness that would trigger most employers.

However, on her dismissal in May 2019, Ms Tijani argued the dismissal was unfair claiming she had been treated more harshly than other similarly tardy colleagues. The tribunal was not convinced; at the time of her dismissal she was already on a final written warning for her timekeeping, or lack thereof, and whilst no disciplinary policy was produced in evidence, the tribunal accepted that poor timekeeping was usually considered a misconduct issue. Ms Tijani was not to be deterred and appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT).  

The EAT dismissed the appeal. They noted the absence of the disciplinary policy as 'unfortunate' but ruled that in the circumstances the tribunal was entitled to find the dismissal fair. The number of occasions Ms Tijani was late was so high and her employer had warned her, when issuing her written warning, that she would be dismissed if her poor time keeping continued. Her claims of harsher treatment were discounted for lack of evidence.  

As irritating as latecomers can be (or so I am told!), this case is not a green light to dismiss staff who struggle with timekeeping. What it does demonstrate however, is the following:

• ensure that persistent poor time keeping is confirmed as misconduct within your disciplinary policy - given the HCC's policy was not produced for this case it does make me wonder whether it was silent on this point. In this case, the regularity of the lateness was so severe it was not as relevant as it might be in cases where the lateness is less extreme 
• keep monitoring lateness and follow up persistent culprits - the HCC did this consistently and with examples ranging from 2 minutes to over 40 minutes and followed through with warnings etc. so it was hard for Ms Tijani to argue her employer had behaved unreasonably 
• we do not know the background to this case but always be willing to address the why of the situation; why does this member of staff continually turn up late? why aren't they getting the message that it's not acceptable? Are there caring responsibilities that mean they cannot get to work on time? Does a disability impair their journey to work? Could they be given a later start time if there is some obstacle in the way of starting?