LAUNCH: Communicating Staff Dishonesty Student Challenge

At the end of June 2024 we launched our new collaboration project with the masters students [Marketing] from the Loughborough Business School, at the University of Loughborough.

The project brief is below, we hope to publish the findings, results and new communication strategies in the second half of 2025.

Background to the Challenge

Staff dishonesty, often called internal theft, is hard for retailers to monitor, quantify, and detect. For example, one of the main “tools” available to detect internal theft is staff searching, however in a store setting, this is highly problematic to execute well and consistently.

Further, it is seen as hard to prevent, especially through communications, as messages such as “stop stealing” are seen as counter to the goal of creating a culture of trust.

At the same time, it is also very easy for retail loss prevention leaders to prioritise the more visible problem of external theft.

Taken together, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts and the “lions share” of the investment in loss prevention are targeted at external theft, even though best estimates from retailers suggest that a third of losses can be explained by internal theft, which includes collusion

Yet, and working on the assumption that staff dishonesty is a third of a typical retailers losses, its a good year if a retailer can capture and detect more than 5% of those losses. Thus, for most retailers, there is a significant detection gap.

Closing this gap thus is a huge opportunity for retailers, for example, for a retailer with a 1.5% loss rate, and assuming no change in sales, a 35% reduction in staff dishonesty, would lower losses to 1.3%, a 20 basis point improvement.

There are arguably very few other interventions that a loss prevention team could deliver, over the course of a year, that could have this level of significance to the bottom line.

This student challenge will seek to find new and different ways to prevent staff dishonesty through communications and then publish data on the impact of advertising staff dishonesty to the industry in the second half of 2025.

Staff Dishonesty Communication Challenge – Objectives.

The challenge aims to discover new strategies to reduce staff dishonesty through communications and advertising.

The students, allocated across five retailers, will first seek to explore with their respective retailers, their current approaches to reducing staff dishonesty.

The students will then explore and identify new possible strategies and communications that could deliver impact.

In the final part of the project, the retailers would then test the advertising campaigns in their business to understand impact, specifically, the levels of shrink pre and post campaign, to answer the question does staff dishonesty advertising work? t

Timeline.

Kick off – June 25th

Competition Finale – October 16th

Retailer Pre Vs Post Advertising Trials – First Half 2025.

The report will be published in July 2025. For more information, contact colin@ecrloss.com