It’s keeping you up at night, cold sweats and nightmares about living in a 6’ by 6’ cell. You can feel the cold breath of the police on your neck. It’s unrelenting. Justice will be served. You will be caught and your family and friends will be interviewed for the 10 o’clock news, assuring everyone that you “seemed so nice”, and that no one “saw this coming”. OK, maybe not. But it’s very likely that you have stolen something from your employer at some point. Go on. Admit it.
Of course this is a tad melodramatic. But the data and surveys suggest that we (almost) all do it. Consider a survey carried out last year by Cartridge People who found that 61% of workers have stolen items from their office. These items have ranged from stationery such as pens and mugs to even toilet rolls. The survey had over 2,000 responses with many admitting they had sneaked something out of their workplace.
Pens were the most likely item to be taken home with 80% of those who responded admitting to pen-pinching at work. This was followed by Post-it notes (40%), notepads (32%) and highlighters (25%).
When it came to taking toilet rolls, one in ten owned up to lifting some loo roll from the staff toilets. This one is mystifying because I have never, ever worked or been somewhere that had such silky soft toilet paper that I found myself thinking “This is the most comfortable toilet paper I have ever encountered. I simply must take some home!”. In my experience, office toilet paper is usually the cheapest, roughest, scratchiest 2-ply tissue paper that money can buy. But apparently it still goes AWOL…proving that people will take anything.
Showing that 61% of workers admit to some small scale office theft is a huge increase from the 28% of workers who made the same admission in a survey published by the Post Office the year before. In that survey, over 1,500 workers were questioned.
This jump in the number of people admitting to taking something they shouldn’t could cause potential problems for businesses that are left counting the cost of replacing stolen items. At least with our involvement in reviewing this area of expense for your organisation, even if you don’t manage to stop various items going missing, you can ensure that the cost of the item walking out the door is minimised for your business.