Loss prevention security professionals that have been in the business for some time understand that simply conducting employee theft investigation after investigation is not the primary solution to company profitability.
I began to notice early in my career that the loss prevention people are really the ones catching the sludge coming out of the end of the pipe. We deal with the most undesirable soon to be ex-employees. When you are constantly doing this you have a tendency to look up the pipe and try to figure out where all of this comes from. The answer is that it starts the moment that a person walks in to apply for a job.
If your company has poor or weak hiring policies then you are simply setting the company and yourself up for more sludge. I am not even going into the issue of what this costs the company to train and replace the bad hire let alone the cost of that a poor performer caused you in lost sales and productivity. That is for another blog.
Loss prevention is exactly that, preventing loss. In a way when we have to conduct an employee theft investigation we have lost. Whatever the employee did should have been prevented. So how do we do this?
Security and loss prevention must be involved and have input into the hiring process. We should be working directly with Human Resource management as partners to achieve the company’s goal, which is a profit.
Our company should be selecting the most desirable and best candidate for the position. Part of this should be consideration for their background and attitudes. Has this person been involved in any undesirable behavior, criminal activity, poor personal money management and poor work history? In addition what is this candidates attitude towards management, supervision and loss prevention. What is their work ethic? All of these areas affect the company and loss prevention mission, profit. Loss prevention security is not simply chasing bad guys
This is in addition to security and loss prevention involvement in other areas such as inventory control, merchandising and store layout. Loss prevention security personnel must interface with all areas of the company to insure that the profit mission is achieved. But again these are issues for another days blog.
Security and loss prevention is one of the major keys to a profitable company. Ignore it as many have done and face an unprofitable environment while catching more sludge than you should have to.
For more information contact us: security and loss prevention or call 1.770.426.0547
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