21 Tips To Cap Staff Temptation – Part 3

7. Don’t make it easy.  Ensure that you have simple rules in place about how stock and other valuables (including stationery, equipment and consumables) are to be handled, and where they are not to be taken – for example, to staff areas, change rooms, lunch room or outside of the premises.

These rules may include, in a retail context, excluding employee bags from counters or other areas where small stock and other valuable items are stored; signing for any equipment or assets that are removed off site; etc.

8. Have clear, tight refund, exchange and warranty policies.  Make sure there is a clear and watertight paper-trail for extraordinary movements of money and stock such as occur when purchases are refunded, goods are exchanged or other goods or services are provided for lower or no payment.

9. Offer employee discounts.  It’s an easy matter for you to pass goods and services to your employees at a discount and the real cost is neglible – in fact there may still be a small direct profit in doing so.

You may also be able to extend this to providing access to a range of goods provided by your suppliers that you don’t normally trade in, and even discounted access to the products and services of some of you business clients.

Here you are demonstrating care for your team, passing a financial advantage and adding value associated with the job, all of which encourage fairness to your in your team.

10. Rotate responsibility for running and auditing your security systems. The stories of the faithful bookkeeper who hasn’t taken a holiday in 10 years, being found guilty of embezzling a million dollars are legion!  They didn’t take holidays because, if they did and some else did the books in their absence, their manipulation of the system would have been discovered!

So, mix rosters, rotate responsibilities, and enforce holidays.

11. Don’t encourage collusion.  When rostering staff for duty, don’t allow friends to consistently work with friends; instead contribute to building a broader network of relationships across your team while also increasing your security by rotating partners particularly when one party is collecting and another checking money, stock or other valuables.

12. Spot check.  Randomly select a day in which you check every aspect of the value flow within your business.  Cross check receipts against takings; invoices against receipts; stock movements against sales.

Instruct that all items across the point of sale will be scanned rather than hot keyed on one shift or day, to check for practices such as selling a high value item to friends by keying it as a lower value item.

This not only keeps you on your guard, but lets staff know that you are monitoring and enforcing the systems (the police car parked behind the billboard again!)

13. Spend time in the trenches with the troops. The practice of having management periodically (randomly) spending time at the coalface of the business, in the trenches with the troops, is invaluable on a number of counts:
a. It provides management with an up-close view of the workings of the systems.
b. It provides direct contact with Customers and direct observation of staff’s interaction with Customers.
c. It uncovers inadvertent or deliberate abuse of steps in the accountability systems.

Any one of these counts make this practice worthwhile. All in combination make it just good business!