No matter how much you trust your employees, theft in the workplace is a problem you can’t afford to ignore. Protect your company and your honest employees with these safeguards:
• Control your cash. Remove temptation by making cash difficult for employees to take. Make sure checks are secure, so no one can steal them. Require more than one signature on any check or purchase order. This tells employees you take security seriously.
• Watch your inventory. Merchandise and office equipment make attractive targets for would-be thieves looking to sell items they can steal. Even your customer data can be lifted and then repackaged for unauthorized use if you’re not careful. Install adequate security measures to ensure your inventory is locked up and safe.
• Monitor employee access. You can’t write every check yourself, nor keep an eye on your inventory night and day, so you have to rely on trusted employees to get things done. Just don’t open up access to everyone on your staff. Limit the number of people who hold keys to secure areas of your workplace or who know the passwords to your network’s critical data.
• Look off site. If your employees work outside your office, or if your organization is large enough to sustain separate workplaces, keeping an eye on things gets more difficult. Surprise visits can keep employees on the straight and narrow. Require workers to sign out equipment when they leave to meet with a client, and confirm that it’s been returned when they get back. Track the time they spend off site to see whether certain employees are taking longer than necessary on specific tasks.
• Mix things up. Don’t assign the same employees to the same job all the time. Every once in a while, ask someone new to check inventory or audit your books. Move managers between business units—it’s better for their development and it can help you spot problems they might otherwise be able to hide. Keep track of vacations: An employee who hasn’t taken any time off in six years may be hiding something.
—Adapted from the Bizmore Web site