The Real Cost of Business Theft and 12 Ways to Prevent It

1. Stick to reliable security principles 

Your plan should be innovative and customized to your specific needs, but you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. You should be able to apply many tried and true physical security principles. 

Balance security and productivity 

While you need to secure your business, there is a point after which too much security cuts into your productivity. Costs start to outweigh the benefits of added security. You need to find the balancing point between those two priorities. 

Be realistic 

You’re not aiming for one hundred percent theft prevention. That is never possible. We recommend following the Pareto Principle, which means trying to address the twenty percent of thefts that likely result in eighty percent of your financial losses. Take out those leading causes and then decide how much more theft prevention efforts will be cost-effective. 

2. Use your employees the right way 

People both help and hurt security. They’re your greatest security asset and also your greatest vulnerability. Your theft prevention plan should maximize the valuable on-the-ground adaptability your workers bring and minimize gray areas in your processes where human error can cause outsized problems. 

By analyzing many different programs, business theft prevention experts have found that encouraging employees to buy into new security programs is almost always more effective than rigid compliance policies. Employees need to see how your new business program will make their lives better. When they’re invested in your company’s success, they’ll be much more likely to help protect it from theft, especially when that theft is coming from other internal workers. 

3. Design a program that leverages people and technology 

Now you can get down to actually designing your theft prevention program. Start by identifying your vulnerable spaces. These are often areas where people are unsupervised. Identifying spaces this way often reveals that you can reduce theft simply by reorganizing the layout of some of your most vulnerable areas. 

Then identify the points in business processes where theft can occur. You’ll need to introduce checks and balances into these processes to reduce the risk of theft. For example, you need to trust your personnel to carry out their jobs with access to company resources, but you should put checks to limit unnecessary trust points. 

For example, don’t leave one individual unsupervised access to the budget, procurement, use, and disposal of major business assets. That creates too many opportunities for fraud. Instead, break up that workflow as efficiently as possible and put more eyes on how employees use that money and equipment at each stage. 

Seek input from stakeholders on different teams within your organization, not just security. They can provide outside perspectives and concerns about the theft on those other teams that might not be obvious to a group of dedicated security professionals. 

4. Make a fresh inventory

Now that you have a theft prevention framework in place, make a new, complete inventory of every valuable asset in your organization. Log essential information about each. That could include: 

• • Owner team or individual 
  • Storage location 
  • Make and model 
  • Serial number 
  • Purchase date 
  • Warranty information 
  • Usage notes 

Create a process for ensuring new equipment is logged in your inventory and old equipment is retired, so your inventory stays as accurate as possible over time. Errors will happen, of course, so you still need to schedule periodic audits. 

5. Document your program and theft prevention policies

Once you’ve developed your theft prevention plan, you need to publish and share it with your workforce. Clearly document everyone’s roles and responsibilities. Document the procedures each individual or team needs to follow to prevent theft in the workplace. Keep the language in this policy as straightforward as possible. 

6. Implement new security controls 

At this stage, you start putting your plan into practice. 

• • Publish your new plan and policies 
  • Install new physical security measures, including barriers and access control systems 
  • Deploy any new technologies you might need 

 7. Train your people 

Next, train all of your existing employees on your new program, their roles, and the policies they will need to follow. This is the point where you need to reinforce how vital better theft prevention is for them and the company as a whole. 

Also, make sure to build updated theft prevention training into your new hire orientation process. Make sure your new procedures are part of their introduction to the company so you can start building a culture of safety from their very first day with the organization. 

Then communicate regularly with all of your teams to remind them how important business theft prevention and a culture of safety are to your workplace. Finally, give teams feedback on their performance and congratulate successful leaders in theft prevention efforts. 

8. Automate theft prevention when possible

Smart systems use embedded computers to monitor their performance and make adjustments on the fly. Look for ways to use smart management systems to automate complex loss prevention tasks. 

Smart systems also generate large amounts of data, which is incredibly useful for conducting performance analyses. These systems can find hidden trends that a human analyst might never notice. 

9. Use real-time tracking for faster insight

Real-time tracking systems can help you set curfews on equipment sign-outs, so you know when any expensive equipment is overdue for return. In addition, if a supervisor receives an alert that an item is missing, they can immediately begin a search, which significantly increases the chance of recovery.  

10. Stop thefts before they happen with strong deterrents

Conspicuous security measures demonstrate that your organization takes theft seriously. Even just putting signage around exits warning that you are monitoring for theft can make would-be thieves think twice. 

11. Keep everything working with audits and updates 

After you put your plan in place, make sure you monitor its performance. The data you collect from smart systems can provide valuable insights on security as well as business performance. 

You can monitor inventory loss trends. Or look for patterns in employee behavior. For example, is one shift or team responsible for an outsized percentage of losses? Maybe you can apply closer monitoring to that unit. 

12. Also stop errors by improving operations

A side benefit of enhanced monitoring is the ability to gather new insights on business performance. You can improve your company’s effectiveness and reduce costs by eliminating errors, redundancies, and unnecessary losses in all of the critical workflows that you monitor.