In my 30 plus year career in loss prevention I have had the duty to conduct employee theft investigations on over 2300 employees. These investigations have involved employees of all ages, races and positions from entry level to upper management and partners.
Most employee theft investigations must be conducted as a result of management failing to follow their own policy, procedure or even common sense. I have also found that in many cases management will fail to learn from previous employee theft investigations. Not learning from history will make you destine to repeat it.
Get your policy manual out, dust it off, review it and update it. Then make sure that everyone else know and understands that they must follow it. This will be work in the beginning but will make the life of a manager easier in the long run because they do not have to keep reinventing the wheel. You will also find that you will reduce the number of employee theft investigations that need to take place. The rules are there for a reason: It happened before and the company lost money. That’s why there is a policy for it.
Too often, signals pointing to internal theft, even when noticed, are mistakenly ascribed to chance, error, coincidence, or some other benign circumstance….and the signals are ignored.
What are the signals for internal theft? Contact us and we will share some. Internal theft will not go away on its own.
Shoplifters use deception to confuse employees. This could be a diversion such as a Shoplifters partner creating a disturbance in another part of the store, pulling employees away from the merchandise to be stolen.
I have seen situations as simple as a screaming child to faked slip and falls to fake “customer complaints” that get loud. To prevent shoplifting you must train to deal with these situations. If an incident occurs only a limited amount of employees should respond. Others should actually stay away from the incident and turn their attention towards the balance of the store and customers.
Another way to prevent shoplifting of this type is to use your public address system. Make a “ghost call” such as “security to sections 3 and 12”. This will throw the shoplifters off since the shoplifters do not know where these “sections” are and you have announced two that sound like they are far apart. At that point your legitimate customers could be Security personnel as far as the Shoplifter would know.
