—
Humans are the most complicated being on earth. The state (good, bad or worst) of the world today is totally dependent on the activities of humans. Human behavior is dynamic and can be hardly studied for future outcome. This is because there are some factors (social, economic, political and environmental) that can influence a person’s behavior at a given period.
This simply explains why humans have different motives per time; some individuals are planning on safeguarding the lives and property in a particular society, while others are planning to execute terrorist act. It also explains how some top leaders are planning to make the world a better place by helping the needy and refugees while others are building nuclear weapon program worth billions of Dollars for the destruction of mankind.
I am narrowing this perspective of human behavior to workplace environment based on personal experience. Apart from capital and machineries, good employees are the most important organizational valuable resources. But, on the contrary, immoral employees are business worst nightmares especially when it is difficult to identify and flush them out of your organization.
It came to a period in my company where profit was declining despite a steady rise in the number of customers and increased sales. One didn’t need to tell me that something is wrong somewhere. The workers were productive and showing great zeal to achieving stated goals, but I knew that someone…… somewhere was exploiting my company’s loopholes.
One major thought on my mind then was; problem identification. This is because…. without identifying where the problem is, there is no way you can solve it. It was not quite long when I started to spy on iPhone text messages that I uncovered some nefarious activities of my staff.
Firstly, the company’s products were overloaded in each truck. More than 10 packs were not accounted for per day. This is simply connivance between the supervisor, security personnel and the customers. Secondly, the company’s vehicles were most times used for private purposes; i.e. transporting heavy duty goods to other locations. Thirdly, fifteen liters of fuel was bought per day instead of the stipulated twenty liters.
Doing the Needful
Putting round pegs on round hole was my first action. This entails sacking the most unscrupulous staff and redeploying others. Immoral employees are like virus; they have the capacity to negatively affect the good ones. Hence keeping them is like wanting your organization’s growth to be stalled.
By redeployment, I selected employees that, with the best of my knowledge and good judgment, can maintain a high sense of integrity in handling organizational resources.
Employees’ Monitoring Program
The organization’s employees’ monitoring program was intensified. Instead of quarterly performance appraisal program, a more proactive performance management program was introduced. This was geared towards evaluating the daily workers’ input. Employees’ monitoring software and spy camera were also installed in the organization to have real time activities of workers.
Basing new Recruitment Exercise on Past Behavior
By laying off the bad eggs which were cogs in the wheels of my organization’s progress, there was need to hire. In doing this, I paid adequate attention on past behavior of the applicants. According to study, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so capturing reliable data on candidates’ reputation is the best way of evaluating their integrity. Unless we do so, immoral behaviors will remain the “silent killer” of individual careers and organizational effectiveness.
In conclusion, humans have good or evil motives. One needs to be extremely careful when dealing with your fellow individuals because you do not know who wants you down and whose gat your back covered. The more effort you put to curtail human’s nefarious activities, the safer the world would be for us to dwell.
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images