The Person Who Is Always Ten Minutes Late

They arrive ten minutes after the start. Every shift. It has been going on for two years and it has never been a formal conversation.

Everyone has stopped expecting them on time, which is the problem.

What it costs

Somebody else covers the ten minutes. ⚠️ Every shift. The same people. They have noticed and they have stopped mentioning it.

The start time stops meaning anything. ⚠️ Others adjust downward. Not deliberately — the standard is what people see, and what they see is that ten minutes is fine.

The handover degrades. The first ten minutes is when the shift is set up. Doing it a person short means it is done badly, every night.

It becomes unfixable. After two years, raising it looks like a sudden complaint about something that has clearly been accepted.

Why it was tolerated

Each instance is trivial. Ten minutes never justifies a conversation on the day.

They are good otherwise. ⚠️ Usually true, and it is the reason it has run for two years.

The first conversation never happened. After that, every subsequent day makes the conversation harder — and the difficulty compounds while the cost accumulates.

Having the conversation late

It is late. Do it anyway, and take the delay on yourself.

Own the tolerance. ⚠️ "We have let this run and that is on us" — accurate, and it removes the ambush.

Be specific about the cost. Not "it is unprofessional" — "the handover happens without you and somebody else does your setup." Concrete, and hard to argue with.

Ask whether something makes it difficult. ⚠️ Sometimes there is a real reason — transport, another commitment, childcare — and the answer is to change their start time, which costs nothing and solves it completely.

Then state the expectation and the date it starts. Not retroactive.

The version that is your fault

Worth checking before the conversation.

Is the start time real? ⚠️ If nothing actually happens for the first ten minutes, everyone knows, and the punctual people are the ones being wasted.

If the start time is padding, fix the start time. A real start time that is kept beats a fictional one that is not.

Protecting the people who are on time

The part that gets forgotten.

⚠️ They have been absorbing this for two years. Say something to them — not about the individual, but acknowledging that the setup has been landing on them.

Tolerated lateness costs you the punctual people, slowly, and they leave for reasons that sound like something else.

Ten minutes is not the same as an hour

An hour late  obvious, addressed the same day
Ten minutes  absorbed, every time, by whoever is already there

⚠️ The small lateness is the one that survives, because each instance is too minor to raise and the cumulative version is too large to raise comfortably.

Where the ten minutes actually lands

Not on the venue  the shift still happens
On one colleague  the person who started on time, alone

⇒ ⚠️ The cost is paid by a specific person, not by the business, which is why the business does not notice and the person eventually does something about it — usually by leaving, or by arriving late themselves.

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Why it was tolerated for so long

The first time  a reason, and a good one
The tenth time  a habit, and no longer discussed
The fiftieth  part of the schedule everyone silently works around

⚠️ Nothing was ever decided; a series of individually reasonable non-decisions produced a permanent arrangement.

The point it became permanent

⇒ ⚠️ The moment somebody adjusted the rota around it. After that, the lateness is load-bearing, and raising it means changing more than one person's shift.

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Two versions that look identical

Cannot arrive on time  a transport or a childcare constraint
Does not arrive on time a habit

⚠️ These need opposite responses and almost nobody separates them. The first is solved by changing the start time; the second is not solved by anything except naming it.

The question that separates them

"Would a start time fifteen minutes later be reliably met?"

⇒ ⚠️ A yes gives you a scheduling answer with no conflict at all, and it is often the true answer that nobody asked for.

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Having the conversation after a year of silence

Opened with the history  becomes an argument about the past
Opened with the next month it stays about what happens now

⚠️ Do not itemise the last twelve months. It is unanswerable and it puts the person into defending rather than agreeing.

The version that is your fault

⇒ ⚠️ If nobody has ever mentioned it, the person has reasonable grounds to think it does not matter. Say that out loud when you open — it costs nothing and it removes the injustice from the conversation.

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What everyone else learns from it

Unaddressed  punctuality becomes optional, quickly
Addressed once everyone else notices, and nobody has to say anything

⚠️ This is the actual reason to deal with it. 　 ⇒ The lateness itself is minor. What it teaches everybody else about 　 　 which rules are real is not.

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Three to hold

Actual start times against rostered, for a fortnight. ⚠️ Measure rather than assume — it is frequently more people than the one everybody talks about.

Who covers the opening tasks. Concentration is the cost, and it has a name.

Whether the first ten minutes has real work in it. If not, the schedule is the problem, not the person.

Where the record has to sit

A pattern over two years is only visible if arrival times exist somewhere. If lateness is noticed and not recorded, every instance is trivial and the pattern is unprovable — which is exactly why the conversation kept being deferred.

tasteck keeps shifts and attendance on the same record, so a pattern can be looked at rather than argued about.

They are not taking advantage. They were ten minutes late on the first day, nobody said anything, and that became the start time.

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