Dov Seidman: Lisa Belkin On Office Theft

While Googling several Blogazines, I came across this article re office theft. While not strictly tech in nature, this issue represents a greater part of company-employee governance. I found it to be very interesting given my experience with "empowerment" in the workplace in the 90's.

To read the full article, please click the title. Why do I do this? So you, the reader, will be motivated to visit the source of this article. That source is How Blogazine and points to Lisa's Life’s Work column: “I Lost My Laptop in Outer Space, and Other Tales of Office Theft" in The New York Times.

"How much is too much?
In today’s New York Times, Lisa Belkin writes about the shifting threshold companies and employees have regarding personal use of company items. Lisa interviewed me for the piece and I offered that a possible solution to the problem of theft may be as simple as not classifying minor thefts as transgressions in the first place.
Lisa’s story looked at the fine points of the issue, but there are some larger points here as well.
If you embrace the notion of governing through culture, it’s clear that the most important issue here is shared understanding. Companies that can successfully inspire their stakeholders with common purpose and enlist them in a shared idea of what kind of company they want to be will breed less of the cynicism and sense of entitlement that sparks retributory actions by their employees. If you share in the goals of the group, you’re less likely to feel that they owe you something.
When oppositional thinking declines and alignment increases, instances of larger-scale theft is likely to decline, too. So, in an odd way, when a company’s culture attains a shared understanding that, say, taking a row of staples home is okay but taking the stapler is not, instances of embezzlement or expense-report cheating might also decline. (I think Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics would like this thinking.)
The key issue is that every group must seek to build a common understanding of what belongs to the company and what belongs to company’s shareholders. Every group can answer that question differently—some might say take anything one likes and some might say hands off everything—but all must seek shared understanding."