Where are employees late for work most often?

Where are foodservice employees showing up late for their shifts most often?

On average, foodservice employees in the US are late to their shifts 11.1% of the time. 

In a month of 20 shifts, an average employee will be late to roughly 2 shifts. That means in Charlotte, North Carolina employees show up late for 3 shifts per month, while in Las Vegas  that number drops to less than 3 shifts every two months.

The most on-time employees live in these large cities:

Employees late to work the most live in these large cities:

Note: Oklahoma City has a slightly worse late arrival rate of 15.09%, but we’re only including metro areas here where we have over 300,000 data points.

Late Arrivals by Business Type, Nationwide:

How do the best and worst cities for on-time arrivals compare?

Could it be the commute?

Probably not. According to the US Census and WNYC data, the average commute time for Las Vegas area ZIP codes is 24.7 minutes, while the average commute time in Charlotte area ZIP codes is 24.5 minutes. Both the most and least on-time cities have average commutes slightly lower than the nationwide average of  25.4 minutes.

What about the minimum wage?

Also probably not. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the minimum wage in Charlotte matches the federal minimum wage of $7.25. The minimum wage in Las Vegas is only slightly higher at $8.25 for many of these employees (in Nevada, the minimum wage is $7.25 with health benefits and $8.25 without, but most foodservice employees at local businesses don’t receive health benefits).

Maybe there are just fewer unemployed people in Charlotte?

It’s true that the unemployment rate is lower in Charlotte than Las Vegas, but not by much. According to the St. Louis Fed, as of December 2018, the unemployment rate in Charlotte was 3.4%, vs. 4.5% in Las Vegas.

How we calculated the data:

Homebase is a free team management app that, among other things, helps managers with shift scheduling and includes a punch clock app where employees clock in and out for their shifts. Homebase is used primarily by local businesses so, for example, foodservice workers at Las Vegas resorts are not part of this dataset.

To tabulate this data, we looked at foodservice businesses using both scheduling and the punch clock over the last 12 months. As a result, we know both when the employee was scheduled to start their shift and when they actually clocked in. We only included metro areas where we had over 100,000 data points (though larger metro areas had over a million time card data points).