When you have so much to deal with at your workplace, it’s easy to look over the small outcomes you never really expected to deal with.
It’s not uncommon for workers to experience strange phenomena where things just seem to vanish into thin air – perhaps you have a tendency to leave your toolbox behind, or a member of your staff always mistakes the cleaning supply closet for the utility space.
But if one day you’re looking for that expensive piece of equipment you definitely remember putting back, and the next it’s nowhere to be found, there could be an issue here. Sometimes it turns up in the oddest places, other times it’s just gone for good. Most of us brush these incidents off as normal workplace chaos, but when you add up the cost of replacing these items year after year, it starts to look less like simple forgetfulness and more like a genuine problem worth solving.
The funny thing is, most businesses don’t realize how much this affects their bottom line until they actually sit down and count the cost – hundreds of small pens gone, small utilities missing, or even expensive utilities requiring upkeep. That expensive drill that went missing last month, those tablets that somehow grew legs and walked away, even just the regular disappearance of smaller items – it all adds up to quite an annoyance for your accounting team and may limit you when you really needed that item to help you work.
Don’t worry, we’re here to help with some timely advice:
Mapping Out The Problem
As strange as it sounds, things often go missing in patterns. Maybe items tend to disappear during shift changes, or certain departments seem to lose more stuff than others, and you’ve noticed these trends. Looking at when and where things vanish most often tells you a lot about what’s really going on, instead of pointing fingers randomly. Equipment tracking solutions can help spot these patterns before they become expensive problems as well as help you tag them and inventory their storage in advance, showing you exactly where your weak spots might be.
Creating Clear Responsibility
Nobody likes playing the blame game and you don’t want a lingering feeling of accusations in the air, but having a clear chain of custody for valuable items makes everyone’s life easier. When people know they’re responsible for something, they tend to keep better track of it, especially if they can be culpable (within internal disciplinary measures) for their loss, insurance or no.
Making Returns Easy
Sometimes things go missing simply because returning them is too much hassle. Setting up easy-to-use storage systems and clear processes for borrowing items helps you put the pin in that “I can leave it to tomorrow” type of thinking. If someone has to trek across the building and fill out three forms just to return a piece of equipment, they might be tempted to keep it “just in case” they need it again tomorrow, so storage lockers and other inventory solutions can really help here.
With this advice, we hope you can better track your workplace possessions and reduce those mysterious disappearances.
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