Employees are willing to help combat crime, and can be recruited as allies in the war against fraud and corruption — as long as the correct approach and attitude is maintained by management.
That’s according to Mariaan van Kaam, director of VoiceIT, a company specialising in attitude and behavioural change programmes that build ethics and integrity.
“A recent case where employees helped reveal the source of a stream of forged qualifications in the mining sector is a real case in point,” says Van Kaam. In that incident, forged mining qualifications were being sold on a mine in Welkom in the Free State, and authorities and the mine owners were tipped off by the miners themselves.
The miners had been educated to the point where they knew that their own lives were being put at risk by the fraudulent qualifications, as untrained or incompetent people down a mineshaft can have fatal consequences for all those on the shift,” Van Kaam says.
It is this principle, she says, that must be used by management as part of its crime-combating campaign.
“If management puts together (programmes) showing how intra-organisational crime affects the workers themselves, and not just the company, the motivation levels to do something about the issue rise dramatically,” she says.
While money remains a strong motivator as a cause of crime, more often than not it is opportunity combined with company behavioural patterns that are the single greatest causes of intra-organisational crime, Van Kaam says.
“If employees feel that management does not care if stock goes missing, or merely replaces it via insurance, and few are ever prosecuted to the fullest extent for criminal acts, then this creates an attitude amongst staff of ‘everyone does it’ which serves to encourage theft or fraud,” she says.
When recruiting staff to take part in an anti-crime drive, Van Kaam says, a mature approach must be taken towards the staff.
“It is no good looking down on them and lecturing them about crime prevention measures. They must be approached as equals and asked for their opinion. Once they know that what they have to say is valued and actually counts, the change in their attitude towards management is remarkable,” she says. ‒- I-Net Bridge