In 2000, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini decided to test an obvious idea: if you punish a violation, violations will decrease.
In kindergartens, parents sometimes arrived late to pick up their children, and teachers had to stay after closing.
So, several kindergartens introduced a monetary fine for arriving late.
The logic was simple: being late became more expensive, which means there should be fewer delays.
The opposite happened.
The number of delays increased. And after the fine was removed, it did not return to its previous level.
Why?
Before the fine was introduced, being late was a violation of an unspoken agreement. The parent understood: the teacher is waiting for them after work, and that is inconvenient. A social norm was at work—"doing this is wrong."
After the fine appeared, the situation changed.
Being late began to look like a service with a set price:
"If I'm willing to pay, then I can be late."
The fine didn't just add a cost to the violation. It changed the meaning of the behavior itself.
In companies, a similar logic occurs more often than it seems.
For example:
a fine for being late turns into a payment for extra minutes;
a formal punishment for violating a process replaces personal responsibility;
a small sanction for missing a deadline is perceived as an acceptable price;
an employee starts calculating not "how not to violate," but "how much the violation costs."
This doesn't mean fines never work.
But there is also a broader conclusion: tracking arrival time in itself is an outdated tool where results can be evaluated based on the work done, rather than minutes spent in the office.
In 2014, Erin Kelly, Phyllis Moen, and colleagues conducted a randomized experiment at an IT company. Employees were given more control over when and where they work. Their control over their schedule increased, but their working hours or perceived workload did not.
In 2015, Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying found in a nine-month experiment at Ctrip: the productivity of employees working from home increased by 13%.
Of course, this does not apply to shifts, customer service, manufacturing, and security—where being present at a specific time is indeed part of the job.
But for many office roles, tracking tardiness has long been confused with managing performance.
Why this happens and why companies continue to measure presence instead of contribution—we will explain another time.
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