The Price of Perfection

I just read an article about a Japanese postal worker who was honored as Employee of the Year in Japan. He was so honored for the fact that throughout his career, he had never missed a day of work due to leave or sickness, nor had he been late to work or left early. In other words, he had a perfect record.

I also hear that some companies pass out awards for such perfection. However, let us examine the other side of the coin. What does it take to achieve such perfection?

Lets think about it. Say a drive to the office in the morning takes 45 minutes under normal traffic conditions. If we left exactly 45 minutes before work, we might be late 20 percent of the time due to unusually heavy traffic, road conditions or other such things beyond our control. Obviously this is not acceptable.

So lets leave 55 minutes early, giving ourselves a buffer of 10 minutes. This may cut the lateness percentage down to 10 percent. If we leave 65 minutes early the percentage may go down to 5 percent; 75 minutes may cut it to 1 percent, 85 minutes to 0.1 percent.

0.1 percent of lateness is pretty good I would say, that would mean an employee is only late once in 1000 days, close to 3 years. That would be good enough for me already.

But to not be late in one's whole career? Say one works from the age of 25 to 60, 35 years. One would have to be late less than 0.01 percent to achieve that. This may mean that one has to leave 115 minutes early. All that extra time wasted in the office.


As for not taking leave, if everyone had that as an aim, wouldn't that induce them to come to work when sick? It's pretty hard to expect people to not get a flu over the course of thirty-odd years. Coming to work when sick would be worse for the workplace I think, germs would be spread and productivity would be low anyway. Might spread an epidemic too.

In short, I feel that never being late or taking leave is not a good thing for us to aim towards, as the hidden costs of trying to achieve it far outweigh its benefits.