As a business owner and an employer, you want to believe that you can trust your employees implicitly, and that they wouldn’t do anything to hurt the business for their own gain. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Employee theft costs businesses in the UK more than £190 million each year. While you obviously want to do as much as you possibly can to only bring in people who are trustworthy, sometimes you need additional security measures just to give you that peace of mind, and avoid costly incidents of employee theft.
We support organisations of all shapes and sizes with both intruder prevention and internal security. Here are top tips for cracking down on employee theft.
Install access control
Access control on external doors is obviously an important way of keeping unauthorised visitors and intruders off your business premises – but it’s also important for internal access too. You want to be able to control movement through your business so that only authorised employees have access to certain areas that might hold expensive stock or materials. At the most basic level you can use manual key code locks to manage access, but for complete visibility and easy management, using key card receivers, you can manage access on a user-by-user basis centrally. This makes it much easier to revoke or add access as and when you need to – and mitigates the risk of an employee still having access to restricted areas should they leave the business. Using a key card system also means that there if there was an incident of theft, it would be much easier to identify the person or group of people responsible. If you know when the theft occurred, you can refer to the system log to find out who accessed the room or area in question when the goods went missing.
Install CCTV
As we’ve alluded to above, even with a stringent approach to access control, unfortunately theft can still occur amongst those who have access. CCTV cameras act as both a deterrent to potential thieves as well as being a useful tool in identifying your culprit. Ensuring that you have a reliable and well-maintained camera system watching over areas of your business where valuables are held is key in preventing opportunistic employee theft. When it comes to monitoring the activity of employees and collecting footage which features them, it’s important to understand your obligations around data protection – you can read more about that here.
Processes and protocols
It’s important that even if you have physical measures such as access control and CCTV in place, that all employees understand the importance of security, and any processes or protocols that need to be followed surrounding it. For example, there’s no use having a state-of-the-art, key card controlled access control system in place if employees share or lend their key cards to other members of staff, or if they “tailgate” or allow others to tailgate (i.e. leave the door open for someone to follow them in). It’s vital that in addition to any security measures you put in place, that you also put in place the appropriate processes, and ensure that staff understand these processes and the importance of adhering to them.
If you’d like some advice and support around your internal security and how you can guard your business against issues such as employee theft – get in touch. We have nearly 2 decades of experience providing end-to-end security solutions for a variety of organisations – from universities to massive logistics sites.
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