Loss Prevention and Sleep Deprivation — The Top Ten Things that Keep LP Pros up at Night
Loss prevention professionals are worriers. It’s part of the job, losing sleep while figuring out shrinkage issues and finding solutions.
Below is our list of the Top Ten Things that Keep LP Pros up at Night. Special thanks to Jeff Stein, president of Executive LP Services and MonitorClosely.com, for contributing some of the issues that have kept him awake over the last 20 years in LP.
The Top Ten Things that Keep LP Pros up at Night
1. The budget for loss prevention, or lack thereof
2. Shrink numbers
3. Staffing (recruiting, hiring, firing, laying off due to downsizing, merger, chapter 11). Finding good entry-level security officers, loss prevention auditors, and store detectives to directors, VPs of loss prevention and CSO’s is always an issue. (Our friend Jeff Stein can help out. Please visit LP-Securityjobs.com, Jeff’s new recruiting site for loss prevention and security professionals, where he’s offering the opportunity to post three job listings for free.)
4. Serious incidents like a fatality in one of the stores or a major catastrophe (hurricanes, fire, string of armed robberies, terrorist attack, etc.)
5. Having a large loss out of one store due to internal or external theft or fraud that is so bad that you have to report it to the CEO/CFO. Then there would be the questions that follow: Why didn’t we catch it sooner? How come we weren’t able to deter it?
6. Waiting for inventory results
7. Balancing quality of life between work and home
8. Lack of a coherent anti-theft policy and program that (a) formally lays out the consequences of employee theft and (b) is widely distributed among the entire work force. For more, see Professor Richard Hollingier’s paper on Deterrence in the Workplace: Perceived Certainty, Perceived Severity, and Employee Theft (free trial subscription).
9. Having all the data needed to the job — it’s either (a) all there but can’t be accessed because it’s spread across different systems, departments or stores, or (b) the data points being collected are not sufficient. See our post on So, you’ve got all that data. Now how are you going to use it? for more.
10. Figuring out dishonest employee dynamics and developing statistical models to predict shrinkage — paraphrased from this article from Loss Prevention Magazine that outlines problems uncovered by the Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC).
If you’re an LP professional, what keeps you awake at night? Please leave us a comment below…
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