Work-related tardiness: Lateness incident distribution and long-range correlations

The probability distribution of the length of time which is lost to an organization due to an employee being late arrival at work, as well as the correlation between the time lost in different incidents and on different dates is empirically studied. Computerized arrival records of the employees in the headquarters of a large industrial firm were used. It is shown that the probability of the time lost in a single late arrival follows a power law with an exponent α ∼ 1 for lateness incidents longer than a few minutes but significantly shorter than the duration of a shift. It is also shown that the autocorrelations for time series composed of lateness incidents of different employees on different dates show a characteristic 1/f^β with β= 0.55 power spectrum. These results are a strong evidence for a kind of "critical dynamics" underlying the tardiness problem. On the other hand, the distribution of the total time lost in the organization due to late arrivals on a particular day is Gaussian.