Would you sweep employee sabotage under the carpet?

Employee sabotage can range from swiping a few pens and a stapler to deleting years’ worth of data, which can cost companies millions in revenue and time. According to statistics, 50% of the American workforce has sabotaged its employers at least once per individual career. Statistics have revealed that the trend is global, averaging at around 40%.

The reasons behind employee sabotage are varied, but the primary motivating factor is dissatisfaction with the working environment. Dissatisfaction takes many forms, including being passed over for promotions, perceived injustice in reviews or disciplinary actions, and difficult relationships with supervisors or managers.

The electronic age has made employers particularly vulnerable to attacks by employees. In an attack against their companies, employees can delete software or data vital to the functioning of the business. They can purposefully download viruses, and they can tarnish business reputations by posting pornography on the site or spamming all clients.

One of the most important ways of preventing attacks by disgruntled employees is to effectively train managers in the art of human behaviour. Before carrying out their revenge, most employees display signs of dissatisfaction and impending maliciousness. Behaviour changes to look out for include tardiness, absenteeism, and undue bursts of temper.

If negative behaviour changes are identified in time, the underlying issues can be addressed and the motivating factors removed. This only works in instances when job dissatisfaction lies behind the desire to do harm. Inherent laziness and disrespect for authority are more difficult to address, in which case, more severe actions are necessary.
To help managers identify acts of sabotage it’s a good idea to increase security protocols by upgrading anti-virus programmes and firewalls, adding password applications to sensitive and valuable data, and by locking workstations. Other key aspects include the ability to identify trends in employee sabotage and what saboteurs gain by their actions. By successfully identifying the outcomes that saboteurs expect, business can establish effective preventative measures.

Businesses tend not to report employee sabotage to authorities, owing to the potential negative publicity back lash. Admitting to being a victim of employee sabotage can result in a public relations nightmare and make it difficult for businesses to recover their good reputations. The upshot of this is that most instances are handled in-house and every effort is made to keep the incident as quiet as possible. Most other employees at the company concerned won’t know that anything is amiss.

If the attack wasn’t too damaging, businesses may choose to simply ignore it, but that usually results in repeat offending and other employees chancing their luck. The best way to address the phenomenon is with quick decisive action, and to advertise to the rest of the staff that that kind of behaviour will not be tolerated.

The important thing for businesses to bear in mind is that acts of sabotage are carefully planned before they are carried out. This means that with some forward thinking they can be prevented. There are not many companies that can withstand substantial financial losses, whatever the reason. With employee sabotage costing businesses an average of $100,000 to upward of $2 million, it’s well worth their while to invest some time and money in preventative methods.

Recommended sites:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7877121/
http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/social/workplace/sabotage/study.php
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,325285,00.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/1999/02/22/smallb3.html

About the Author

Sandra wrote this article for the online marketers DTI Data data salvage and recovery one of the most experienced and expert providers of data recovery services in the UK