Is the best member of your retail staff also a completely honest individual?
Does that seem like a funny question? How could the best member of your staff not be honest?
We constantly come across incidences of dishonesty from our clients’ staff. Staff dishonesty can range from cash theft to stock theft to sweet deals for friends like only ringing through one item when two were taken, etc.
Recently, in an ever more competitive and margin-reducing world, our customers/retailers posed this question to us:
Is there a retail system out there that will help me in only recruiting honest staff members?
Retailers said: Our EPOS system is effective at identifying that we have an issue with managing retail staff bevaviour; through cash and stock discrepancies and eroding margins. Also, through point of sale software, we can narrow it down and sometimes identify the specific dishonest staff member. But then, we have to manage them out using our human resources skills. The amount of time, money and effort it takes to dismiss a dishonest staff member makes it one of the most emotional and financially costly and painful tasks associated with running a retail business. Is there a retail system out there that will help me in only recruiting honest staff members?
Staff Theft Results in More than Monetary Loss
Retailers tend to only measure the damage of dishonesty in employees in terms of monetary loss (cash or stock). There are actually equally damaging repercussions on other aspects of the retail business:
1) the impact on your other (honest) staff members and
2) the impact on your business’customer service levels.
Employee Theft: Impact on Other Staff Members
First, retailers must consider the impact on their team – the honest members of your staff. Working with a dishonest person is a negative experience.Not only is a dishonest person not a team player, but he can cause untold damage to the team spirit and often causing dissention among the ranks.
Employee Theft: Impact on Other Customer Service
Perhaps the most damaging consequence of retail theft on the retail business is the quality of customer service that they give to your customers. If your dishonest employee is more focused on stuffing their own pockets than filling your till, how much customer service do you think they will offer?
The ability to turn a loyal customer into a distant memory can rest on how a return or stock enquiry is handled, or in attitude: a lack of a smile or the absence of good manners like saying “please” and “thank you”. In talking to retailers after they had found out they had an employee theft problem, we found that they often discover that they already had performance concerns with that employee in a number of other areas.
Hiring Honest Employees with Integrity Testing
Well, we scoured the globe looking for a retail human resources tool that can solve this problem for retailers and discovered an Israeli company that has pioneered the art of integrity testing.
A simple 20-minute test in front of a PC measures the integrity of a prospective staff member so retailers can be armed with this crucial information before hiring. Anyone reading this might be cynical. I certainly was. But after spending months looking at hard empirical evidence and case studies of retailers globally, the bottom line is that this tool dramatically reduces the chances of letting a fox into your hen house.
To find out more about this revolutionary product, check out Integrity Testing – Stop Employee Theft with Savvy Integrity. Or, contact us and ask us about integrity testing.
