Got to hand it to CareerBuilder — their regular surveys are a great morale booster for harried HR pros. This edition: Employees’ excuses for being late to work. Check it out and be happy these folks don’t work for you.

On the serious side, CareerBuilder says more than a quarter (26%) of workers admit to being tardy at least once a month, and 16% are late once a week or more.

So it’s a bona fide productivity issue.

We’re wondering if these employees are as imaginative in their work as they are in coming up with these excuses. Check them out:

  • Employee dropped her purse into a coin-operated newspaper box and couldn’t retrieve it without change (which was in the purse)
  • Employee accidentally left the apartment with his roommate’s girlfriend’s shoes on and had to go back to change
  • Employee’s angry wife had frozen his truck keys in a glass of water in the freezer
  • Employee got a late start because she was putting a rain coat on her cement duck in her front yard (because rain was expected later that day)
  • Employee’s car wouldn’t start because the breathalyzer showed he was intoxicated
  • Employee attempted to cut his own hair before work and the clippers stopped working, so he had to wait until the barber shop opened to fix his hair
  • Employee’s car was attacked by a bear (had photographic evidence)
  • Employee drove to her previous employer by mistake, and
  • Employee claimed to have delivered a stranger’s baby on the side of the highway.

What’s the commonest excuse for employee tardiness? Traffic, according to CareerBuilder — 31% of respondents turned to that old standby.

Other factors include lack of sleep, the need to drop off the kids at daycare or school, bad weather and public transportation delays.

The survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30, 2012, and included more than 2,600 hiring managers and more than 3,900 workers nationwide.

 

The post ‘Sorry I’m late — I was attacked by a bear on the way in’ appeared first on HR Morning.

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