I’m proud to say that Mexico City is the place where I’m
from, I have lived there all my life, and my last job there was Commercial
Manager of the biggest school and personnel transportation company in the City.
I was able to interact and get to know very well all the stages that the
service represented, and was kept on the loop by my boss on what was happening
among the work force in terms of the units used to provide such service.
The company had over 1000, and every one was equipped with a
wide variety of security features and some extra components such as
radio-transmitting devices, GPS computers and first aid equipment among other
things.
The problem came to our attention when the diverse school
and company client contacts started complaining that their assigned units were
not properly equipped, saying that some things were missing. After some time
passed and these complaints increased the problem was obvious, our own people
were robbing us, and this was creating many problems with some long-term
clients.
We automatically designed contingency plans on how to tackle
the problem and started coming after the main suspects but to our surprise
sometimes even those drivers were innocent, as security checked for their
equipment when the unit leave the grounds and again when returning after the
day, leading us to believe that the robberies were taking place from the inside
out as all the units spent every night on the company grounds.
After a couple of months we learned of an small group of
operators that were coordinated with one of the night keepers and were robbing
all the unit’s radios, first aid kits, computers and even milking the fuel
tanks while in service. At this point extreme measures were taken with
undercover security among the operator force that eventually led us to the ones
that were responsible.
If I had unlimited resources I would put together a company
whose main business is to identify dishonest employees through social networks,
this will be achieved through:
·
Monthly employee surveys that question operators
on their work habits, associations, leaders and overall day-to-day practices.
·
Careful information research from past cases in
order to create filters that avoid hiring individuals with these
characteristics.
·
Relying on influential Operators know for their
honesty and accomplishments within the company and start from an inside out
perspective.
·
Adopting
a policy of hiring under employee recommendation basis.
The most important network results will be measured on the
inventory reports from security and grounds master, and noticed on the weekly
meetings along with constant improvement efforts on the matter.
By implementing the social network principle in hiring
policies we would get benefits such as:
·
Establishment of trustable channels throughout
the workforce.
·
Set in motion a compensation program that would
have a positive impact on the employee.
·
Impose filters that would help the company both
internally and externally.
1 comment:
Nasty problem indeed, and difficult to deal with. You've made a very good attempt to propose how to deal with it. What SNA might have helped identify is the "small group of operators" by using an innocent question like "who do you spend time with?" Although it is probable that they would catch on to what you're doing and answer falsely, even that might be useful, as if it's clear to others that they do spend time together, this anomaly might be used to catch them in their lie. Lots left to think about, but very interesting idea.
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