Keeping your company and your employees safe goes beyond having the right security system. Arming your business with the right security technology is a great way to protect your business from the outside world, but how do you protect your business from the inside?
Your Employees
You hired them. You pay them. You pay them to do a job they agreed to do. You’re frustrated. They don’t seem to listen, understand you, or follow through. You’re not all on the same page.
They may not be doing the work the way you want it done but does that mean they’re a threat to the security of your company? Maybe not. But it stands to reason; the right people are less likely to steal from their employer than the wrong ones. Jim Collins made the term, right people in the right seats, popular in his bestseller Good to Great. But what does it mean? Who are the right people? A simple definition is offered by Gino Wickman in his book Traction.
Core Values + People Analyzer™ = Right People
To reduce your risk of bad employee behavior we’ll focus on right people and leave right seats and core values for another time.
The People Analyzer:
The People Analyzer is a tool that can also be found in the book Traction. It’s designed to clarify whether you have the right people in place or not.
How to use the tool:
First put the names of the people you’re going to analyze in the left column. Then list your core values across the top. Next, rate each person according to their adherence to the core values and give them one of the following three ratings:
+ They exhibit that core value most of the time.
+/- Sometimes they exhibit the core value and sometimes they don’t.
They don’t exhibit the core value most of the time.
You will notice in the example above, Julie is absolutely the right person for your organization, Chuck is acceptable, and Bob must go. Your leadership team decides on what the bar is. The “bar” is the minimum standard you will accept from the People Analyzer results. Our leadership team will accept as a minimum three pluses, two plus/minuses, and zero minuses.
Why it Matters
What’s this got to do with staff safety, employee theft and your company’s overall security?
We believe people who are aligned with your company’s core values are more likely to be happy employees. And it seems reasonable to conclude that happy employees are highly unlikely to pose a security problem for the company.
We used to hire people for their skill set. Often overlooking our misgivings about whether they were a good fit for our company because we were so enamored with their experience and skills. This is not to say experience and skills aren’t important but alignment around core values wins every time. You can’t teach them or coach someone to aspire to them. They may change in the short term but eventually their true colors show. It seems these people are always out of step with the rest of the organization resulting in frustration for them and the rest of the team. They require more of their manager’s time and attention. This can lead to feeling unappreciated, undervalued, and like an outsider. This can lead to justifying theft.
The Wrong People
In the above example Bob is a minus on integrity. This should concern Bob’s manager and the leadership team. If Bob doesn’t have integrity we all understand he presents a risk to the company’s security. Most often people caught stealing time, inventory, or customers from their employer justify their behavior. They tell themselves they have it coming. Sometimes this starts small like stealing a small amount of office supplies. They might justify their actions by telling themselves they are underpaid and entitled to help themselves. Once they’ve compromised their integrity it’s easy to see how they might justify taking more of what they believe they have coming.
It seems reasonable to conclude that a person who’s aligned with your company values is most likely happy and content working at your company. After all they are working with people who share the same values. Clearly there are many other things that contribute to a person’s level of job satisfaction. Do they like working for their manager? Do they like the nature of the work they are doing? Do they feel valued and see how what they do contributes to the success of the organization and do they have a way to measure that success? But we believe it all starts with being in alignment with the company’s core values.
You hire them, you pay them. You pay them to do a job they agree to do. Why not reduce your risk of loss due to bad employee behavior by hiring and keeping people who value the same things you do?