From my experience (I am working since 1998 in a software company with more than 150 employees) I can tell you that, in our company, "the late coming policy" did not had a positive impact. People get frustrations. Maybe some of them will try harder to come in time at the office but not for a long period and for sure will be many who will not pay any extra-effort for it. On medium and long time it works in the detriment of the company.
Between 2001 – 2005, we had a rule that everybody has to be in the office at 08.30 and for each 2 days late / month / person, that person gets a penalty of 2 hours from his / her salary. As I mentioned, at the beginning they tried to be in time but after that they accumulate frustrations. Some of our good people were start looking for other jobs because they felt that the company is unfair with them. They are good people, hard workers, with high performance but also some of them with a strong personality and they felt unappreciated.
Since 2006 I convinced the owner of the company to be more flexible and to try to empower the project managers with more authority. They are now fully responsible for their people. I mean, we have a regulation, our people can arrive at the office between 08.00 – 09.30 but, with their project manager approval, they can come even after 09.30. During the day they can have 1 -2 hours off, again, if the project manager approved their “request for couple of hours out” (Of course these hours should be recover). The holidays are also approved by project managers. We tried to educate our project managers how to approve such kind of requests but we are giving this authority to them because, in fact, the project is their responsibility.
As I mentioned, we implemented this in 2006 and I can tell you that it works perfectly. At the end, PM’s are more responsible and the people are not feeling trapped in a very rigid system. Additional benefits came after we implemented this system, in recruiting, because now we are well-known on the market as a flexible company (from the working program point of view) and it helps us a lot in recruiting the best people on the market.