The Find: Management guru Bob Sutton has found a simple and elegant solution for stopping employee theft cold.- The Source: Sutton’s Work Matters blog.
The Takeaway: In an office, it’s hard to get excited about employees walking off with a stapler or a ream of paper, but as Sutton points out employee theft in general (including at manufacturing and retail sites) can and has been accurately measured and it amounts to a much larger loss than you might expect. “There is big body of research on theft by employees, as it costs employers billions of dollars,” Sutton explains. So why do employees do it and how do employers stop it?
Sutton says, “the most extensive and impressive stream of research on employee theft has been conducted by Jerald Greenberg,” and it shows “stealing is driven, in large part, by employees’ desires to ‘get even’ with companies and managers who treat them in cold and unfair ways.” So how do you stop theft? In short, kill the thrill. Researcher Gary Latham did just this at a large sawmill with about 1000 hourly workers and 200 managers where employees were stealing a million dollars in equipment years from the mill. Sutton explains the two part technique:
First, they installed a library system where employees could “check-out” the same kind of equipment for personal use anytime. The effect was immediate, because it was no fun to steal anymore and bragging about stealing something that was free did not earn you prestige in the peer culture, so theft drop to virtually zero immediately. It continued that way from then on.
Second, management had an amnesty day where employees were invited to return missing equipment without fear of punishment. Management said they assumed that anything being returned was as a favor to a friend and the employee had not stolen it. On that day, employees showed-up with one truckload after another of stolen stuff…. Apparently, workers (mostly men) were in trouble with their wives because the stolen stuff was taking up so much room in garages, storage sheds, and so on!
(Image of office supply thief’s declaration by solidstate_, CC 2.0)
