Guest Author - Robin Rounds Whittemore

It is time to exercise your brain today. Read the below scenarios and then answer the question(s) at the end of each. I do not have the answers to the scenarios below, but your boss or HR department at work does. Do any of the situations mentioned below apply to you? Do they apply to co-workers? Are they really a problem?

Scenario 1) You are a real workaholic and your boss assigned you a project that you could take home. Your boss also allows you to take home a stapler, tape, white out, pens, pencils and the like. You do a great job on it and your boss is very pleased! When the project is over, do you return the materials that you were allowed for the project? If not, is that stealing in the eyes of your company?

Scenario 2) You work at a beauty center. Companies give you samples to hand out to customers. As a representative of the line, you are supposed to appear every working day in their makeup and smelling of their perfume. Of course, you get a discount with which to buy what you want. Do you help yourself to the samples for the customers? Are you supposed to? If so, how many are you allotted?

Scenario 3) At work, they decide not to make you sign out for breaks any more. You start dawdling coming back from break. At first, it is a minute here, and a minute there. Within a month, you are coming back from your breaks a total of 5 minutes a day. It shouldn’t be a problem as it is not much time, right?

Scenario 4) Lunchtime at work rolls around and you are starving. You look in the break room fridge and realize that you left your lunch at home sitting on the counter. Rain is pouring down so hard that if you had soap, you could take another shower. You aren’t going anywhere and there is no time for delivery now. You look into the freezer and find quite a few common frozen dinners. You take one, promising silently that you will stop by the store tonight to get a replacement for tomorrow. How wrong is that?

Scenario 5) Let’s say you use the company telephone to call an old buddy just once a week. You talk for only five minutes. You know the charge is five cents a minute for the calls. Five minutes times five cents is twenty five cents a call. There are four weeks in a month, so that would mean $1.00 per month for 12 months, equaling $12.00 per year. This is what your company is shelling out for you to call your friend. Let’s say 9 other people do it. Let’s say 99 other people do it in a big organization. The company has the money to spend, right?

In all the scenarios above, no one got hurt, killed, or even frightened. The victims here were mainly companies. After all, companies have budgets.

Companies have budgets, yes, but they are there for a reason. Making copies on the company copier may not cost much, but if everyone did it, the costs would go through the roof. Do you know how much a ream of paper costs your company? Do you know how much ink it takes to make your copies? What does the ink cost? How many other people besides you are dong it? You know the old saying, “Everybody does it”.

My father and late husband worked at a company that made employees stop at the guards’ desk and open their briefcase to show they had not taken anything.
One retail craft store I was working at part-time also adopted the same policy.

At the new-hire orientation for a bank I once worked at, we were told that if we were caught stealing anyone’s food from the break rooms, it meant immediate dismissal. Their stance was that if we would steal food at lunchtime, we would steal anything. Theft in any form was not something they would tolerate.

In the movie, One Hour Photo, Robin Williams played a photo tech in a drugstore setting. He became obsessed with a certain family. When they brought in their photos, he made duplicates for himself. Eventually, his excessive use of the machine was found out and he was fired.

When in doubt with company policy, your best policy is to simply ask. Ask if you could use the copier, the printer, or the phone for whatever purpose you may have. Some companies do allow it now and then. Be prepared to explain why you need them. If they tell you not to do it, then use an outside source for whatever you need. It would be a shame to get written up, or possibly lose your job for something that could have been prevented.