We have this situation at work, that has been puzzling me. It's basically a petty theft habit from one of our members - not something hugely important honestly, but I've been wondering if there is some way to approach this situation that will have a positive and productive impact. So I'll write it out here, partly to organise my own thoughts on the situation, partly hoping for some good advice and insight :)
To paint the picture, we had suspected this member of taking little things like toilet paper and not paying for drinks from the fridge for a little while. They also are one of our most frequent user, spending about 5 days a week in the woodshop working on their business. They do a lot in integrating new members, keeping the space clean and other small and useful tasks. This member also has a tendency of feeling victimized when confronted with certain facts, and twisting reality to selfishly suit their personal needs. Like bringing up certain issues as community issues, while it's their personal gripe with someone.
After our first post-Covid fundraiser garden party this week (that went great and was lots of fun!) - my boss had a suspicion and decided to check the newly installed security cameras. It's late at night, around 3am and everyone but 3 people are left drinking in the yard. And we see this member go inside to pee, and then take a beer from the fridge without paying. Then fumble around with the bag of potatoes to take a couple. And put their hand in the change jar at the entrance while going back out the door.
This potato-thievery is really not a big deal, but now that we have video proof we also can't really ignore it and let it slide. The footage is low resolution, and can probably still be denied with claims like "i had put money in the change jar before, i was taking back some change!" or other similar claims. The member was clearly drunk and acting out of habit.
It's funny because we were recently remembering a guy that got kicked out of a friend group he's been part of for about 5 years, doing weekly jam sessions. For being caught stealing like 20$ at a party from someone's coat. Imagine losing a whole friend group and community for 20$? Everyone liked that guy before, now he's banned forever. Clearly, the people doing this are not thinking of it in these terms. It's probably more akin to some kind of entitlement - thinking whatever they take is somehow "due" to them. Or that they really "need" it.
So the next step will be confronting the member. Accusing them will not go well, and I believe it's not below them to deny all accusations and go on a retaliation campaign and paint themselves as a falsely accused victim. It doesn't help that they have a confrontational past with my boss, partly due to their different communication styles, party due to my boss being a straight cis male and them being a lesbian. My involvement in the discussion might smooth the gender-bias aspect of it a bit, but that's not enough to make it go a positive direction. My ideal outcome would simply be for them to acknowledge fault and vow to not do it again. And we can rebuild trust from there. This is clearly a more deeply seated issue that is above out paygrade as simple administrators of a workspace. It's also something we can't tolerate since a lot of how the space works is built on trust - and building a solid culture is one of our key goals right now. Repercussions and sanctions seem too harsh for potato theft, and exposing their actions to the wider community is not something I want to do it it can be avoided.
I'd like to come at it from a place of empathy - but it's impossible not to feel attacked when you are literally being accused. We need to be firm and clear that what happened is real and unacceptable. While also giving them enough space to feel heard and encouraged to change instead of cornered and victimized.
I'm not very worried, since even if it goes badly the wider repercussions are not dramatic. But it feels like good practice for difficult conversations and dealing with people issues.
Update on the situation: Sent out an email, asking for availabilities to meet. She answers right away, asking what the meeting was about. When I stroll I to work around 1:30 pm, she asks if we can have that meeting as soon as possible. She’s having what looks like the start of an anxiety attack and says she already knows what it’s going to be about. So we pawn off the new members tour that was about to start in 10 minutes to a veteran member that happened to be there and meet in the office. She basically breaks down crying, saying she has an appointment at the hospital tomorrow for psychiatric help with alcoholism, knows she fucked up and hopes not to be admitted to an in patient therapy . She had already left a hidden envelope with 40$ with the beer downstairs out of shame, and was working up the courage to confess what had happened to us. So… It went better than I expected basically. She’s getting help, we’re gonna be better at locking drinks away post-party, and I feel like my biggest worry where she would deny and turn against us has been avoided. She seemed relieved to be able to confess, and grateful we did it in a private and respectful manner. I hope she gets the help she needs :) I feel that the point was also made that we have cameras and that we don’t let these things slide. If we see any such behavior again, for sure there will be repercussions. But as of right now, that warning as well a seeing how she had already taken many steps to remedy the situation - we’re going to let things be. Maybe the proper attitude would have been repercussions and consequences right away, but only time will tell if this was the right approach.
What a surprising outcome. Good... I guess? Or is this what the kleptomaniac does every time she is caught/called out, to avoid taking responsibility for her actions? Time will tell. My hope is she gets the help she needs and becomes a productive member of your community rather than a drag on your emotional resources.
There's a Dan Ariely book about this. A few highlights: 1) You caught them once. They steal habitually. They've been stealing for a long time. They steal because they're entitled. They will keep stealing because it's their right. 2) Nearly everyone steals. Something like 20% of people don't steal little things. Stealing little things is part of our social nature, it's one of the things that gives us a sense of belonging. 3) Clamping down on the minor breakage that is a part of any organization will cause more breakage. 4) Reminding people to be honest will actually make people more honest. 5) Confronting someone for stealing and then asking them not to steal anymore will do more to ramp up their theft than anything else you can do. They understand intellectually they shouldn't steal, but spiritually they deserve what they're taking and forcing a reckoning of that dichotomy will double down on the intellectual justification to address the gaping spiritual need provoked by your contesting their right to theft. The positive thing to do is put a hand-written sign on the fridge that says "we wouldn't take your beer without paying for it! =(" and literally nothing else. Don't mention it to the member, don't mention the cameras, don't mention it to anyone else, let it the fuck go. And even that might be too much. This member sounds as if she's pretty deeply involved in the organization. And it sounds like she doesn't feel properly appreciated. My father had a saying - "if you don't fairly compensate your employees, they'll work out fair compensation on their own." Of course he stole a bunch of shit. And I took that to heart - one job bought me a brand new Fluke 87 without knowing it. Another gave me a full set of tools. Granted I kept their $23m in contracts humming so really, who's making out best here? See how insidious it is? Here's that thought process: "I do a lot for this place. Also, I want a beer. Also, this place owes me a beer." "Maaan, I do not feel good about taking this beer." "I cannot return this beer for that is truly weird." "If I do not drink this beer I did not actually take this beer." I have an experiment for you I'll bet she's there when other people aren't. Just work people. Give her a sixer of beer - when nobody else can see it, just from you guys to her, nothing to do with budgets or sales or organization or whatever - to show her you appreciate everything she's done. I'll bet theft goes down. I'll bet she becomes less defensive. And I'll bet you'll have another few weeks worth of checking inventory to see if breakage goes down or stays constant. All it will cost you is a sixer of beer. _________________________________ Either that or kick her out now because confronting her in any way shape or form is going to poison everything with every person she interacts with. It'll be like giving your organization leprosy.We found the beer undrank and unopened in the yard in the morning - it was the clue that led us to checking the video footage actually.
They also are one of our most frequent user, spending about 5 days a week in the woodshop working on their business. They do a lot in integrating new members, keeping the space clean and other small and useful tasks. This member also has a tendency of feeling victimized when confronted with certain facts, and twisting reality to selfishly suit their personal needs. Like bringing up certain issues as community issues, while it's their personal gripe with someone.
The semantics of "steal" is very important. And I'll just give you a small example. In many of our experiments, the way they work is the following: We give people a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, and we tell people go ahead and solve as many of those as you can, and we will pay you a dollar per question. People work as hard as they can for five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, we say stop, put your pencil down, count how many questions you got correctly. Now take the sheet of paper and go to the back of the room and shred it so there's no evidence remaining. Come to the front of the room and tell us how many questions you got correctly. And people come, and they say they solved six problems, we pay them $6, they go home. What people don't know in the experiment is we played with the shredder. And the shredder only shreds the sides of the page, but the main body of the page remains intact, and we can find out how many questions they really solved correctly. And what we find is that lots of people cheat a little bit. So we've tested about 30,000 people so far, and we found 12 big cheaters, people who cheated kind of all the way, and together they stole $150 from us. And we found 18,000 little cheaters that together stole $36,000 from us. And I think it's - for me, it's kind of this realization, that it's true that there are few big cheaters out there and it's really terrible, but the capacity to cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves is really much more common than we think it is. And because of that, it's much more dangerous. And because of that, also, we need to think about how we engineered the environment - especially around politics and the business world - not to let that cheating kind of blossom and create tremendous devastation.So, you know, we tend to have an easy time kind of raising a finger and say, oh, it's this banker or it's this particular person, and if anybody else was in the job, they would have acted very differently. The reality is that we all have the capacity to cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves.
Points well made. Seems like so many of our anti-vaxxers are like the 18,000 little cheaters all stealing our freedom from the larger pool that we are all part of. An anti-vaxxer thinking, "I don't deserve to take any risk by getting the jab, I'll slide by and steal some protection from those saps that are listen to actual scientific reasoning. That choice mulitplied by the thousands now becomes our problem with the Delta Variant.
I've been coming around to the theory that progressive politics is driven by empathy for several years now. COVID has made me hypothesize that conservative politics is also - but that conservatives lack the abstraction necessary to see someone outside of their homogeneous socioeconomic strata as human. I think it's a much easier sell for progressives to go "we're all in this together." I think it's a much easier sell for conservatives to go "it's a matter of personal responsibility." Unfortunately, there's a profound scientific bias to "all in this together" in virulent contagious diseases. I remember when AIDS was GRID - "Gay-Related Immune Deficiency." It wasn't until we'd vilified a hemophiliac kid to death that Hollywood could even think of making Philadelphia. My wife disagrees with me, but I saw a profound sea change in the Los Angeles anti-vaxxer community when Disneyland had a measles outbreak, and California mandated childhood vaccines in response. There were a lot of entitled white women firmly in the "herd immunity is what the little people owe me" camp but as soon as it became "and I'm going to have to home-school them and my friends at Whole Foods don't think I'm cool anymore" all the casuals got their kids poked. There were still anti-vaxers, they were just militant. They were unreachable. Nobody was on the fence anymore. We're seeing that now. We lost a client yesterday because we told her that if she wanted to bring her 5-year-old with her to appointments, her 5-year-old was gonna have to wear a mask. We lost another long-time client because she decided she didn't want any vaxed people "shedding antibodies" around her while she was in labor. I don't know if I have a point. Mother Earth News did a survey about six years ago to find out the political leanings of their readership and were stunned to discover that racist preppers will put up with the hippies if it means they can learn about windmills, and that granola-crunchies will totally stockpile AR-15s if it means they can ride out TEOTWAWKI. I think there used to be at least two axes in politics: "I do/don't care about my fellow human being" and "I do/don't trust my government as far as I can throw it." It kinda feels like COVID is bringing those axes to light again as the CrunchGranolas end up discovering they have more in common with the redhat libertarians than the BLM libtards. I guess my point is the anti-vaxxers ain't the 18,000 little cheaters. They've opted out of our society but since they don't have anywhere else to go, they'll show their contempt for the one they're stuck in. That's why teenaged boys vandalize shit - they have no agency but they have a lot of anger. The lady with the unmasked 5-year-old is an anti-vax protester who made the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune by like beating someone with a sign at a protest or some shit. We weren't sorry to see her go. What about the 5-year-old tho
I really think this is the right way to go if the person is a net contributor. The amount of chaos to your tribe this will bring for a single potato is not worth it. If you were running an authoritarian company then maybe it’s worth making an example but in a cooperative it’s not wise unless the losses from that person outweigh the benefit they bring
Great line. I think this is a point that is virtually lost on all upper level managers. When I first started at my last job, they used to have parties with an open bar twice per year, and they used to give you your birthday as an extra holiday (which you could use another time if you want). They used the financial crisis (from which they didn't really suffer very badly) as an excuse to cut every small perk that cost them money. The net result that I can say anecdotally is that everyone basically said, fuck this place if they think I'm a line item on a spreadsheet, and we were all the worse off for it. Clearly government also suffers from that same thinking on all sides of the spectrum.3) Clamping down on the minor breakage that is a part of any organization will cause more breakage.
Foreign policy is determined by elected officials on a four-year window and carried out by career spooks practicing a career. "Look I beat the Soviets" gets Charlie Wilson a Congressional Gold Medal. "Look you're sowing dragon's teeth" falls to Benezir Bhutto. Management is determined by power-hungry appointees eager to Pareto Principle their way past their competence and carried out by employees who just want to trade their lives for a paycheck. "Look I decreased our revenue burn by 0.16%" is easy to put on a powerpoint. "Look he made our jobs suck now" is not.
I'm very straight forward about these kinds of things, it usually seems to work. I'd go with, "We know you've engaged in some petty theft, we aren't debating your guilt, we know that you have taken certain things from us. Stop taking thing or there will be consequences." If they wanted to engage in further discussion I would tell the person they have to leave now but they will be welcome back tomorrow. If they want to debate, tell them they have to leave. Personally I'd get rid of a petty thief that engages in strange social behavior, it probably won't end well.
I think it might be better to have a few instances of this documented before you confront the person. Just in case you are wrong. Maybe they threw a 20 in and then didn’t pay after (I’ve done that before when I don’t have change). I guess you would hate to be wrong about this because once the accusations are made you are just better off firing this person because they will forever hold a grudge. There is no going back once it’s done
Yeah, that's the touchy part. The actual footage is not of very good quality. And there could be extenuating circumstances, where they might have thought they paid, or paid earlier. We found the beer undrank and unopened in the yard in the morning - it was the clue that led us to checking the video footage actually. The part where she puts her hand in the tip jar is really far away and you can't really tell what happens - just that she's taking instead of depositing something, and then puts something in her pocket. And banning a person for taking 2 potatoes ... eh (that we're actually gonna give away on Monday since we have many leftover and they would go to waste otherwise). It's genuinely small potatoes, I'm not advocating for any repercussions yet . But just get the message across that we're onto her, and that this behaviour is not accepted at the space. If only because it's breaking the trust we have, it's a bad example to set to other members and it's unfair. No one is above the rules. We're threading lightly, since an accusation is not retractable. But a common strategy of petty thiefs is also gaslighting... And tolerating shitty behaviours from people that "contribute" a lot in other ways, or have a certain status is what creates a toxic kind of community.
We were making poutine as part of our event - many potatoes leftover! We're also a makerspace with 9 different diciplines, so finding weird stuff around is commonplace. I totally get the "stealing from big corporations" mentality, but we're a non-profit that's only just getting off the ground. And the person in question is a new entrepreneur. I guess different people see the line at different places, because i'm convinced she would not have stolen from an individual. But stealing from the makerspace, is just stealing from the other 100 members - some of them struggling artists and entrepreneurs just like her... But maybe at some point the link is too far removed to notice? Or drunken selfishness wins over?
I can speak only for myself, but one of the things that keeps me out of makerspaces is "makers." The whole "I make tacky shit on tools I can't afford so I can dump it on Etsy to justify my hobbies" thing is a bridge too far for me, but I'm a rich asshole who can do obnoxious things like buy $600 casting machines. If I were a "new entrepreneur" an ownership stake in the facility I was forced to use might make me hate myself less. And that ownership stake could, theoretically, come from "potato access."
"Consumables" on a Hollywood set is pretty much anything that doesn't take batteries or have a serial number. You will buy Sharpies, you will by gaff tape, you will buy red vines and they will go away. But you can also expect the label maker, tape measures, etc to wander off, too. Bluetooth speakers cross the line, as do power tools, but there's a certain level of "it's here, we're underappreciated, it's ours." When I worked at PlayNetwork, if you knew the IT department you could walk out with every song we had. I think it was on the order of 10TB of MP3s.
Been there many times, and there is - sadly - only one "right" thing to do: They have to go. This individual has a sense of entitlement about the space. It is Theirs. The deserve the things they take because of everything they put into the space. But that's bullshit. And you are NOT the only ones that know about this. I guarantee it. Other people know. Other people know that "the management" of the space isn't doing anything about it and wont do anything about it because this person is "too important to let go". Confronting the individual and expecting them to reform will not work. This person is ENTITLED. If you call them out, they will immediately turn the conversation into an argument about everything they do for this place, and - if they even choose to stay - will be a negative energy and asshole for the rest of their time there. Their perfect little fabricated fictional world is crushed now, and they will do nothing but badmouth the organization for ever... even while remaining a member. The only option is to print out the security camera images of them taking the beer, and their hand in the tips jar. Show them the photos and simply say, "If you leave voluntarily and end your relationship with (our makerspace) we will not get the police involved, and will not mention this to anyone else." This is NOT a conversation. This is NOT a discussion. This is a STATEMENT OF FACT. Say it, and shut up. Do not say another word, no matter what they do/say. Confronted with evidence of their wrong-doing, and knowledge that your security cameras have probably picked up a bunch of their thefts, they will pack up and leave quietly. From then on, their name is not spoken again. People will ask where they went. You just say, "Some issues came up and they have terminated their membership voluntarily." And THAT'S IT. Conversation over. Eventually they will join another makerspace. You will be friends with the owners of that space. You will want to warn them, but you can't. NEVER badmouth someone; say nothing at all. Because, if the person has reformed, they do not need their past misdeeds looming over them. In a private discussion at some point, you might want to share a "best practice" with the other makerspace of having security cameras installed, and how it has helped you resolve "issues in the past." Let the other makerspace draw their own lines between the dots. I know you are worried. You think their loss will hurt the makerspace. It won't. People like that have a negative energy or pull about them. There has been a cloud around the space for a while - you know it, you felt it, you knew something was "off" - and everyone else knows that too. When that energy is gone, the place will do better, it will feel better, and you can move on. It will be rejuvenating and it will re-energize the very walls of the space. It will also give space for another maker in the space - one with integrity - to rise up in the esteem of the other makers. It's hard work, but it is work that needs to be done. Kick them out. Now.