Tipping isn’t enough

A paper entitled “Cleaning House: The Impact of Information Technology Monitoring on Employee Theft and Productivity” — by three academics — studied how staff at 392 restaurants in 39 states stole from their employers.  Other studies estimated that employees stole 1 percent of revenue, which is a lot in a business that typically works on a 2 to 5 percent profit margin.  “Theft alert” software was installed in the restaurants, and the scope of the pilfering became clearer:  after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.