Three Best Ways to Catch an Employee Thief
Three Best Ways to Catch an Employee Thief |Wall Street Journal|By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
If your small business can’t afford external auditors, security cameras or other resources for spotting employee fraud, consider doing some detective work of your own. The effort could save your firm from a significant financial loss or worse—failure.
After all, a single heist could be fatal for a small business, says Richard Hollinger, a professor of criminology at the University of Florida. Small firms typically don’t have
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Employee fraud can take place right under a business owner’s nose. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, an anti-fraud trade group in Austin, Texas, such activities occur on average for as long as two years before the victim organization catches on.
The phone keeps ringing. Some corrupt workers will instruct friends to repeatedly call a business and ask if the owner is on site until the answer is no, says Mark R. Doyle, chief executive of Jack L. Hayes International Inc., a provider of workplace crime-prevention services in Wesley Chapel, Fla. Once they hear those “magic” words, the friend knows it’s safe to come by and swipe merchandise under the rogue employee’s watch, he explains.
The math doesn’t add up. Two years ago, ReShonda Young noticed a subordinate at her father’s transportation company, Alpha Express LLC, had turned in a weekly time sheet with more hours than he could’ve possibly worked. That prompted Ms. Young, a manager at the Waterloo, Iowa, company, to investigate further and she discovered that the employee had been stretching his hours for months, initially to a less-noticeable extent. “I guess it got to be a little easy,” she says. Now all supervisors must review and sign workers’ time cards before they can be processed, says Ms. Young.
Money problems surface. Financial pressures are a key motivator of occupational fraud, the ACFE reports. For this reason, business owners should take note of any excessive complaining by a worker about money burdens. And if such a person’s lifestyle suddenly improves dramatically, this could signal he or she has their hand in the company’s cookie jar.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
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How to Manage Multiple Business Locations
How to Manage Multiple Business Locations | Inc |By Darren Dahl | Mar 4, 2010
Thomas Friedman was onto something when he wrote his book, The World is Flat. Companies increasingly feel the need to expand their reach into new markets—both domestically and internationally—from a very early age.
One direct result of this expansion is that you may now be forced to manage multiple locations and oversee employees in distant offices—a fact that can cause quite a few challenges and headaches, says Eric Bloom, president of Manager Mechanics, a management-training firm based in Ashland, Massachusetts.
“No matter how widespread your organization becomes, you need to work hard to retain team cohesion and the philosophy that everyone is on the same team regardless of where they work,” he says.
Dig Deeper: Why You Should Expand
Managing Multiple Locations: 6 Challenges
1. Out-of-site-out-of-mind syndrome. When things get busy at your primary location, it can be hard to give your employees based at other locations the time they deserve.
2. Loss of spontaneous communications. Because you do not see your employees in the hallway or at meetings, there is very little natural or unplanned communication.
3. Attenuated logistics. Anything that cannot be sent electronically, must be mailed, which causes time delays and increased effort.
4. Complicated work assignments. It is harder to perform certain types of jobs or collaborate on them when employees are based in remote locations
5. Lack of team cohesiveness. Your team members will not know each other as well. This can easily lead to an “us-versus-them” mentality.
6. Concerns over general supervision. If you have a remote office that clients visit, it’s virtually impossible to see if your employees are arriving on time, working appropriate business hours or wearing proper business attire.
To tackle these and other challenges, then, organizational leaders need to focus on three key areas: systems, technology, and communication.
Managing Multiple Locations: Put Systems in Place
The old adage is that systems run businesses, and people run systems. “You must have systems in place to be able to standardize the quality of your communications, products and results,” says Bert Martinez, founder of Bert Martinez Communications, a business training and communications company with multiple locations. “Systems will allow you to duplicate offices and grow faster with reduce training times and supervision.”
The key is to establish clear responsibilities, boundaries, and authority, says Ann Latham, president of Uncommon Clarity, an organizational-behavior consulting firm in Easthampton, Massachusetts. “Vague responsibilities create the proverbial cracks into which everything drops,” she says. Muddy boundaries create disasters ranging from personnel problems to legal ones while insufficient authority can become a source of delay and demotivation. “An employee with everything needed to exercise good judgment except either the authority or sense of responsibility to do so is worth little,” says Lantham.
The point, then, is to make each employee’s responsibilities clear through an organizational structure combined with a system that measures each and every employee, and holds everyone accountable for delivering on their work responsibilities regardless of where they are based.
Dig Deeper: Building Systems to Manage Your Business
Managing Multiple Locations: Adopt New Technology
With the advent of the Internet, and the prolific surge in the number of collaborative tools that have spawned from it, technology has become an integral part of the backbone for any far-flung organization, says Bloom, particularly because it can help your organization cut down on business travel expenses.
While many organizations rely on custom-built software platforms and intranets as collaborative platforms, some of the most commonly-used tools by small businesses in particular are also either free, cheap or available as a software-as-a-service, which means you can access these tools over the web for a monthly fee. Some of the best and cost-effective options include:
• Google Documents, Gmail and Calendar for internal training and communication.
• Basecamp: An popular project management tool.
• Facebook : The now ubiquitous social networking tool is just as useful for business as it is for personal applications.
• Skype: The surge in VOIP technology and software means that you can communicate with remote employees cheaply and effectively.
• Salesforce.com: One of the most popular tools around, Salesforce.com allows remote sales team to collaborate in real-time on maintaining your company’s sales pipeline.
A new wrinkle in terms of technology is that many firms have begun to equip all of their employees with smart phones such as the iPhone as a way to enable them to access any web-based technology regardless of where they are, including many new applications.
Dig Deeper: The Latest Small Business Technology News
Managing Multiple Locations: Focus on Communication
Systems are a must, technology is important tool however, none of these will work with out real communication, says Martinez. “Communication is the key to collaboration with your offices, coworkers, and clients,” he says. If you neglect this aspect of running your business, you do so at your own risk, particularly in a business with multiple locations. That’s why Martinez also makes having his employees have time face-to-face a priority by having his offices take turns hosting each other once a year to enable communication between people on all levels.
Other tips for fostering communication between your employees based in the office and elsewhere include:
1. Establish full team weekly staff meetings via phone or webinar to get your whole group together.
2. If possible, have web cams so your team members can see each other.
3. Make each physical site responsible for a specific type of work, rather then assign random tasks associated with a central project.
4. When doable, have the CEO or management members personally visit each remote site on a scheduled basis, every month, for instance.
5. Establish weekly phone-based staff meetings individually with each remote group so that each physical location will get time with top management.
6. If possible, get your whole group together once or twice a year for staff meetings, brainstorming and team building.
Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Communications Skills
Managing Multiple Locations: The Global Workforce
Managing multiple locations across the U.S. is hard enough. But when you add a new sales office or manufacturing plant overseas, says Bloom, you can actually run into a host of new challenges associated with cross-cultural communication that include:
1. Time zones. There is limited or no overlap in the standard workday.
2. Language. Even if everyone has a common language, English for example, differences in accents, language fluency, and the use of slang expressions can make communication extremely difficult, particularly on conference calls and speakerphones.
3. Social norms. Cultural differences from country to country can accidentally cause tension, embarrassment, and miscommunication.
3. Holiday schedules. Scheduled meetings, reporting deadlines, cash flows and standard business processes can be derailed or delayed based on local holiday schedules.
4. Technical connectivity. Not all countries have high-speed connectivity at all locations.
5. Labor laws. Laws regarding hiring, employee termination, hours worked, layoffs, sexual harassment differ from country to country.
6. Business-related laws, ethics, and practices. Business is conducted very differently from country to country.
7. Personal-privacy laws. In European Union member states, the laws regarding the personal use, storage, and transport of personal information are quite stringent compared with those in the U.S.
Dig Deeper: Building the Best Virtual Workforce
Managing Multiple Locations: Adapting to Different Cultures
Bloom suggests tackling these challenges by considering the following tips:
1. Find one key contact in each country that is very knowledgeable in local customs, business practices, and laws.
2. Learn to pronounce people’s names correctly.
3. Gain a basic understanding of country politics and current events.
4. Know the names of your managers and leaders in those countries and pronounce their names correctly.
5. Find ways to take advantage of the time zone differences.
6. Be respectful of the differences between people and cultures.
The bottom line in managing multiple locations, says Martinez, is to help make everyone in your company feel motivated and part of the team, regardless of where they do their work. “When your people feel good and that they matter, they will perform better,” he says.
Dig Deeper: How to Be a Lead Teams in Emerging Markets
Managing Multiple Locations: Additional Resources
Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World, by Charles Grantham, James P. Ware and Cory Williamson (AMACOM, 2007.) This book will show you how to get your company to embrace new technology, understand the ever-changing workforce, and rethink the way you structure work environments to deal with the global economy.
Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World, by Victor K. Fung, William K. Fung and Yoram (Jerry) Wind (Wharton School Publishing, 2007.) A book filled with solid tips to create a flexible organization capable of competing anywhere.
The Facility Management Handbook, by David G. Cotts Kathy O. Roper and Richard P. Payant (AMACOM, 2009.)
A great reference guide for understanding and implementing best practices for the modern workplace.
Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means
he Wall Street Journal | By STEPHANIE RAPOSO, AUGUST 6, 2009, 6:42 P.M. ET
Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com—a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms—she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
Ellen Weinstein
Say What?
A sampling of some popular shorthand texting terms.
* UG2BK . . . . . . . You got to be kidding
* GBTW. . . . . . . . Get back to work
* NMP . . . . . . . . . Not my problem
* PIR . . . . . . . . . . Parent in room
* GFTD. . . . . . . . . Gone for the day
* FYEO. . . . . . . . . For your eyes only
* BI5 . . . . . . . . . . Back in five minutes
* DEGT . . . . . . . . Don’t even go there
* BIL . . . . . Boss is listening
* PAW. . . . Parents are watching
* 99 . . . . . . Parents are no longer watching
* PCM . . . . Please call me
* IMS. . . . . I am sorry
* TOY. . . . . Thinking of you
* KUTGW. . Keep up the good work
* CID . . . . . Consider it done
* FWIW. . . For what it’s worth
* HAND . . . Have a nice day
* IAT . . . . . I am tired
* NRN . . . . No response necessary
* 4COL. . . . For crying out loud
* WRUD. . . What are you doing
* LMIRL. . . Let’s meet in real life
* ^5 . . . . . . High five
“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.
One reason for the surge in texting abbreviations—more than 2,000 and counting, according to NetLingo—is the boom in social-media sites like Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters. Text messages, too, are limited in length, so users have developed an alphabet soup of shorthand abbreviations to save time, and their thumbs.
Taking time to learn the jargon may seem like a WOMBAT (“Waste of money, brains and time”). But with over one trillion text messages sent and received in the U.S. last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group, you run the risk of feeling out of it if you don’t.
“If a CEO does not appear to be tech-savvy, people may start to wonder, ‘Is the company not plugged into today’s technologies also?’” says Stephanie Grayson, a corporate speech and media trainer based in New York.
Translation Sites
The confusion has given rise to a number of resources that provide English translations for terms like WRUD (“What are you doing?”) and TTYL (“Talk to you later”)—among them independent Web sites like NetLingo.com and UrbanDictionary.com and corporate ones like LG Mobile Phones’ DTXTR.com. Textapedia, a pocket guide to texting terms released last year, is sold in over 4,000 stores nationwide. NetLingo reports a 391% increase in the number of unique visitors over the past five years, while UrbanDictionary says it saw a 40% jump in its unique visitors last June from June 2008.
Both the AP Stylebook and Merriam-Webster Dictionary recognized texting shorthand for the first time in their 2009 editions, which were released in June. The AP Stylebook now includes IMO (“In my opinion”), ROFL (“Rolling on the floor laughing”) and BFF (“Best friends forever”), among others. Merriam-Webster defines LOL (“Laugh out loud”) and OMG (“Oh my God”).
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* Iowa Teen Wins Text-Messaging Championship
* Beware ‘Cellphone Elbow’
* Its Ovr: Breaking Up by Text Message
“These abbreviations have shown they are very likely to be a part of our language for a long time,” says Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster.
Branding strategist Elizabeth Kanna, 50, maintains a “Mom’s Text Talk Sheet,” a cheat sheet of over 30 textisms created and updated constantly by her three teenage daughters, on her desk at work. Ms. Kanna, who lives in Sacramento, Calif., says she refers to it daily as many of her clients prefer communicating through text shorthand like SWDYT (“So what do you think?”) and WDYM (“What do you mean?”).
Bert Martinez Communications LLC, a Houston-based consulting firm, hired a 20-year-old and two teenagers last fall to help teach texting vernacular to its staff of six. “It gave us the confidence that we could use the lingo and connect with the younger clientele on their level,” says Bert Martinez, president of the firm, which now conducts about 20% of its communication with clients via texting.
Teenagers, for their part, text in code for a reason, says Anne Mitchell, president of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy, based in Boulder, Colo. “It is usually because they are involved in activities which they don’t want their parents to discover, such as casual sex, drugs and alcohol,” she says. Indeed, parents may be startled by such popular terms as GNOC (“Get naked on camera”), POS (“Parent over shoulder”), LMIRL (“Let’s meet in real life”) and IWSN (“I want sex now”).
OMG!!!! WSJ’s Andy JORdaN witnesses the crowning of AmErica’s top txtr. It’s LOL!
Susan Avery, senior editor at ParentDish.com, AOL’s parenting Web site, says she has observed parents becoming more concerned about not knowing what their kids are talking about. “The best thing is to embrace it and use it as a bonding experience with your child,” she says.
Shannon Snyder, a writer in Vancouver, B.C., uses DTXTR.com to monitor her children. “I don’t want my kid to be the racist or the rude kid because he’s repeating a random composition of letters he heard someone else say in school and thought it was cool,” says Ms. Snyder, 34.
The fact that 15-year-old Jack Beisel’s mother uses texting shortcuts like HBU (“How about you?”) and CIL (“Check in later”) strengthens their relationship, he says. “It makes her seem like she’s a little more understanding about modern culture,” says Mr. Beisel, who lives in Bayport, N.Y.
The consequences of misunderstanding the lingo can be mortifying. Cassandra McSparin, 23, of Jim Thorpe, Pa., knew a woman whose friend’s mother had died. The woman texted her friend: “I’m so sorry to hear about your mother passing away. LOL. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
It turns out she thought LOL meant “Lots of love.”
Write to Stephanie Raposo at Stephanie.Raposo@wsj.com
10.5 Biggest Mistakes to Avoid When Starting A Business
The following list is derived from my experience. Based on my actions and results I retired from corporate America at the age of 28. Filed bankruptcy at 30. I’ve been involved in several successful businesses and many unsuccessful ones too.
#1 – Never let your expenses exceed your sales. Yeah, I know that’s easy to say, because you say “Jeez, that makes perfect sense, if my expenses never exceed my sales then quite honestly I’m always going to have positive revenue. I’m always going to be in the profit. Wow. That’s fundamentally smart. But c’mon Bert, it doesn’t work that way in the world. Why? When we start out we don’t have any sales yet, and so our expenses have to exceed our sales on day one.” And you’re correct. That’s true, so I want you to have a concept, a goal or even a burning desire. That you will make those days the fewest number of days absolutely possible that your expenses are exceeding your sales.
#2 – Failing to collect the money or the receivables. Question – Should you really be extending credit to people? I don’t care what business your in retail, wholesale, hospitality, legal, or whatever. Selling is what you about not carrying receivables. Don’t extend credit, get paid now! Look fewer customers that have paid you 100% are way better than having more customers when some of them didn’t pay you at all. More cash, less stress – you don’t have to be real smart to do the math.
# 3 – Failing to take care of your employees. People have say that the customer is number 1 – right? Maybe not. Well who is taking care of your customers? Your employees handle quality and service and delivery? Well if you haven’t taken care of your employees, they’re probably not going to take care of your customers very well. It’s just that simple. It’s goes without saying that if you do take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.
#4- Failing to take care of your customers. Real simple the easiest customer to get are existing customers. There is usually more profit in repeat customers than in new customers. A happy customer is a good customer a good customer refers more customers. Take care of your customers and they will take care of you.
#5 – Underestimating your competition. We can, no matter what business we’re in, we think of our competitor as dim-witted, we think of our competitor as incompetent. Remember this -our battle isn’t against them. It’s for the customer, not against our competitor. We don’t win by doing damage to the competitor. We’re not in a battle with him really. We’re in a battle for someone else. So quit thinking about the competitor and start thinking about your competitor’s customers.
#6 Inadequate capital – Now I’ve started business with no money because I had to but then you quickly come to realize that you do need money to operate. You do need capital to grow the company and get to the next level. And here are 2 rules you should remember about capital. And, just in case your not clear, capital is the money we need to fund the organization, to buy the inventory, to hire employees, to do all those things that we’re going to need to do. Well here’s are 2 rules you need to appreciate. Is that your expenses are going to be hirer than you anticipated and your revenue is going to be slower than you anticipated. Those two statements are true in 99.99% of every single business that has ever started. Well that’s what happens. It happens almost all the time. Because we are optimistic, if we weren’t optimist we wouldn’t have started a business. We over-projected what our revenues are. What I’m telling you as a practical, experienced businessman lower that number. Now if you beat, if you excel… wonderful! Find a place to spend it. But if you have shrunk it down, conservative in your projection then you might be safe.
#7 Underestimate the length of time to break even. The break even is a magic moment in the making of a business and if you don’t understand let me try to explain the concept to you. Break even is that magic point when you quit putting money into a company and the company is finally sufficient enough that it starts to pay for itself or is finally starts to pay you for having been there first.
# 8 Focusing on profits instead of on cash flow. Business people, when they first start out, they focus on profits instead of on cash flow. And I know this is going to sound like sacrilege to some people saying well,” aren’t we supposed to be all about profits? absolutely, and yes! And we want to get there as fast as we possibly can! But before we get there we have to make sure something else happens first, and that is that we always have positive cash flow. We always have enough money to pay the rent. We always have enough money to pay out employees. We always have enough money to buy more supplies, to do more marketing, that’s really crucial. That’s called cash flow. Profits will follow the cash flow I guarantee it. Now there’s a different in being profitable and having positive cash flow, you can be unprofitable where you’re actually losing a little bit of money but still have positive cash flow. I’m telling you when your first starting a business, if you have to pick between the two, now if you could have both of them, great go get both of them and that would be wonderful, but I also will tell you from experience getting both of them when your first starting out is really going to be complicated. You’re going to have to make a decision between the two. Pick cash flow when you’re first starting your business.
#9 Over estimating size of your market. Entrepreneurs are optimists and we tend to have this attitude that everyone is going to want to buy what we have – that just doesn’t sell. Get over it. Just come to understand that it’s not going to happen. So what you need to be able to do is think about Bottom Up Marketing. It isn’t how many potential, how many people are out there, it’s about what you can you really do. Bottom Up Marketing looks at your capacity. So if you’ve got 1 employee, 3 employees, 7 employees, that’s all you can handle. It doesn’t matter how many people might want your widget. You can’t handle it! So think coolly about the real size of your market and don’t ever estimate it because you can’t handle it right now. You only need enough market to handle the capacity you presently have, and if you can do that efficiently you will be profitable, and if your profitable you’ll be successful and if your successful you can grow the company again, and again, and again. Do a little research on “Bottom Up Marketing” and you have a better understanding of the concept
#10 No Advertising/Marketing plan. So how are you going to drive your sales through advertising or through sales people. You need to develop your marketing plan, you need to have enough capital to drive sales. I’ve seen to many times were entrepreneurs will invest all this money in equipment or to get the doors open only to discover they have no way to adequately drive sales.
#10.5 – Exit strategy. At one point, P.T. Barnum noticed that people were lingering too long at his exhibits. He posted signs indicating ” “This Way to the Egress”. Not knowing that “Egress” was another word for “Exit”, people followed the signs to what they assumed was a fascinating exhibit…and ended up outside. So what am I talking about? We should start a business that we can create and build something that we can sell, transfer, dispose of, or hand off to someone else. That should be a goal maybe the first goal as you begin to vision your successful business.
Remember . . . You Were Created to Succeed!