Commentary

Onboarding new hires? An opportune time for an underused loss prevention tool

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July 26, 2021 by Mark Manney — Founder/CEO, Loss Prevention Results Inc.

Many convenience services operators are calling back employees or hiring new ones, if they can find them, as the pandemic restrictions ease.

As new employees are coming on board, this is a perfect time to begin theft deterrence marketing to your employees. Known as TDM, theft deterrence marketing is a broad umbrella concept that is one of the greatest unused tactics by business owners when it comes to loss prevention.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of expensive, time consuming, ugly investigation and confrontation cure.

One of the most powerful tactics is understanding how to use the proven power of TDM with your employees from the screening and hiring process on, and deep into the day-to-day operating culture of your business.

An underused tool

TDM is not rocket science, but it is one of the least understood interconnected tactics in business loss prevention. The wrong employee(s) will cost you profit, time and negatively impact the morale of all your employees.

TDM will enable you to deter most employees from stealing and other business abuse behaviors.

TDM will work on the 66% of your employees who, according to industry studies, may steal if they see the 13% who are genuinely dishonest doing it and getting away with it or if the 13% are caught or exposed and there are no real consequences. (21% will never steal, no matter the opportunity, according to industry studies.)

The 66% who may be tempted to steal are not committed thieves and for the most part are copycats when they see the 13% stealing cash, product, parts, fuel, time, productivity and your customer's goodwill without any consequences.

The 66% are easily scared straight, however, if you give them a reason to be. In one way TDM makes the covert overt. That public carefully communicated reality will have a residual deterrent impact on them.

Terminating and prosecuting dishonest employees will occasionally be necessary, but it is also time-consuming, and it can get ugly. TDM will save you a great deal of loss, time, expense and stress.

Begin with employee screening

As my manual: The Culture of Controls: Training — Technologies — Tools & Tactics details, TDM starts in the screening/hiring process, progresses to the often overlooked and undervalued new employee orientation event, and should continue through a loss prevention awareness bulletin board and an in-house company confidential hotline.

An interconnected and relentlessly communicated loss prevention program can narrow and/or eliminate the opportunity for undetected theft and loss (in all forms) while increasing the perception of the chance of detection, in which the risk outweighs the reward.

A key element of TDM is a well communicated and well run confidential hotline, a powerful TDM tactic that will deter many of the 66%.

I brought TDM into 34 micro markets in two clients, and the confidential employee hotline with support from the client's HR manager was tremendously successful with exposing and stopping micro market shoplifting.

The 66% must see the TDM is backed up by real investigative capability. And the 13% must experience decisive clean endings.

Grasping these three individual employee groupings is extremely important in understanding how to achieve the biggest bang for the loss prevention buck that has achieved a 1% to 3% cost of goods reduction in a short amount of time.

Tactically targeting the 66% and the 13% selectively will pay dividends as the "culture of controls" evolves within an operation.

Understanding and using TDM will reduce theft, fraud and business abuse while increasing productivity. If used as outlined above it will become a blinding flash of a steadily lowering cost of goods.

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