When is someone late

I get to the boardroom at 9:55 for a 10:00 meeting.

I used to run regularly scheduled vendor meetings. I started promptly. There was no waiting a few minutes for stragglers! There was no catching people up on what they missed until after the meeting. I value everyone's time, including my own.

Depending on my role in the meeting, I'm 10-5 minutes early.

A friend and I used to have a joke "I want to be a 7 o'clocker!"

It referred to the people who showed up to the school plays/recitals/meetings at the exact time they started and then couldn't understand why they couldn't get a seat in the first row or anywhere at all. We both wished we could be that relaxed and "whatever" when we were showing up at these things at 6:30 to get a good seat (or just get a seat at all!)

Not insulting you "7 o'clockers" out there - if that's how you roll, so be it. But being even 30 seconds late for something stresses me out - so I'm chronically early and ready to go.

99% of the time 5-10 minutes early and ready to go. Where I work in prison... NO ONE is ever on time EVER.. EVER.. so I usually show up right at 10:00 and not a minute early because I will still be waiting for 10-15 minutes on everyone else. I would still be the first person there.

Ooo, the question got me antsy and this is ramping me up!    I've never heard of a 5 minute rule in the workplace and if allowances were being made to let people move around a workplace (perfectly reasonable) then, imho, later meetings should be scheduled to reflect that and officially start later.  Otherwise a subliminal message is being sent out that punctuality is not important.  IMVHO. 

I've always preferred to be 15 minutes early to 2 minutes late.

However, my kids are in virtual learning and one teacher starts right at 9:15am and the other lets people into the Zoom room but will give everyone 5 minutes to arrive and start at 9:20.

Just like if you're supposed to start work at 10 that means start working. Not get to the building, put your coat away, get a coffee, go to the bathroom.

My DH likes to say to our kid, “If you’re not there early, you’re late.” Which is really kind of funny to me because he never used to be that way when we were younger.

I get it, I really do. But I also hate sitting around for an extra 15-20-30 minutes somewhere if I didn’t have to. I prefer to get where I need to be with maybe a 5-10 minute buffer but really no more than that. Especially for things like doctor appointments where they have no problem with letting *me* sit there wasting my time waiting 20-30 minutes or sometimes even longer for them past my scheduled appointment time (yeah, I’m looking at YOU, hand specialist guy that I sat and waited in the room for OVER AN HOUR past the time of my scheduled appointment). The worst part is when no one even pops in to say there is a significant delay. If someone would have told me they were running that far behind, I could have gone to get lunch and still would have been back there before the dude showed up.

One of my pet peeves, meetings that don't start on time! grrrr...

I am always early for anywhere I go. For a meeting that was right near my office (i.e., in the same building) I'd probably wait till the last possible minute unless I really wanted to chat with anyone else who was going to be there. But if I have to travel to get to where I'm going, especially around here with our awful traffic, I leave with plenty of extra time. If I'm too early I'll just sit in the car and read for awhile. 

I stopped attending my community meetings, and our Moms Demand Action group, both because they would ALWAYS ALWAYS say "we'll just wait a few more minutes for the latecomers. um... Nope. That just teaches people they can continue to be late. The Moms group once kept us waiting for 15 minutes, at night.    I saw more than one person walking out during that 15 minutes. 

It doesn't matter what the event. If it starts at 10:00, be ready at 10. Not just walking in, totally ready for whatever the event is. A meeting, work, doctor appointment, dance class, online event, whatever...be ready to go at the start.

Within a couple of minutes of 10:00 a.m. We get ready in our offices, walk into the conference room about the same time, immediately start the meeting. Seriously, if people are arriving early just to sit there and wait, aren't they wasting company time? I am talking specifically about the scenario presented. Any other time, I arrive 10 minutes early. Like for the start of the work day, appointments, church, friends, parties, etc. But to literally go into the conference room early and just sit there, in my job situation, that is just silly. My boss would think we'd lost our minds if we just went in there and sat around waiting until the start of the meeting. With all of that said, none of us would arrive after 10:00 a.m. meeting start. Except our boss. LOL

I'm remote and have been for years, but I don't dial into meetings early. MAYBE one minute early or the time it starts. Not late. And I'm ready to go when I join. My approach was the same with in-person meetings. There's no point in sitting around in an empty meeting room for five minutes to to feel superior.

Also, it takes a matter of seconds to sit down. If I walk in at 10, it's still 10 when I'm seated and ready to go.

In my experience the boardrooms are fully booked so it’s not possible to arrive early. Also, a lot of us are in back to back meetings so even arriving at the meeting time is a challenge, never mind seated and ready.

Someone mentioned scheduling for 5 minutes later, but I have no way of knowing if 3 out of the 10 people have a prior meeting. The only way to solve it would be to have a company wide agreement that all meetings start at 5 minutes past (not sure what we would do about meetings that start on the half hour or that only last 30 minutes) and manually adjusting all meetings from 1 hour to 55 minutes, or from 30 to 25 minutes.

TL/DR in many corporate environments, lateness is due to over scheduling rather than ill will.