Do you steal from your employer? Is it right to steal from your employer? If you do not give a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, you are stealing from your employer.

Your relationship with your employer was freely entered into. Your employer agreed to hire you and you agreed to work. You should provide the services you agreed to provide and the employer should remunerate you per your agreement.

Too often employees steal time and material from their employers. Employees arrive to work late and leave early. They spend extra time at lunch and return to work with their lunch to take time to eat on the job. Employees spend too much time talking on the phone with their friends. If you see yourself in any of this you are stealing from your employer.

Too often employers hire a person to do one thing then try to increase the responsibility, range and scope of work without changing the remuneration package. If you change the agreement on the work side, you should change the agreement on the pay side. If you ask a person to do more work than agreed, work longer hours than agreed, or do a different kind of work than agreed, then the pay should be adjusted. To get extra work for free is slavery!

Bahamians we need to wake up! Piracy and slavery are killing us. Workers do not want to work and employers do not want to pay. Therein lies our problem. We have to fix this to make our nation move forward.

I would suggest above all to be very clear with your standards. There are some things which you should not compromise with. There are times when people working for you are actually actively trying to destroy your business. This you cannot tolerate.

If you are in the retail business, your employees need to learn your inventory or be trained to look up the inventory items from a list. I often experienced customers telling me employees told them we do not have items that we do have. The result was a lost sale. To be sure I asked friends to call my business and ask for certain products. Sure enough, the employee, with great confidence, told them we did not have the product.

Too often employees come to a business and refuse to learn how things work or what goes on in the business. Their actions make it clear that all they want is wages at the end of the week; they do not want to contribute anything to the business. If this approach does not change, as a business person you have to replace this employee with someone who will contribute to your business.

The bottom line is you sell a product or a service. If you sell a product that you bought, on a gross scale you must sell the products for more than you bought them for in order to stay in business. Often times your employees think you should sell the products for what you bought them for; they do not consider that they get paid from the proceeds of product sales. They do not consider that some of the products you buy do not get sold - they too have to be paid for from the proceeds of the products you do sell. Then there is electricity, national insurance, water, insurance, asset maintenance, professional fees, license fees, bank charges, loan repayments etc. All costs must be covered from the proceeds of sales in order to stay in business.

I will deal with the consumer in another thread but they act to destroy your business too. A customer gets a product or service and pays. A consumer is always trying to get something withour paying. Watch out, customers often try to switch to consumers. Your employees are often actively involved.

When you sell a service you are often reselling the skills and time of your employees. If your employees do sloppy work you have to redo the work but you cannot charge twice. You lose. If your employee is unproductive, takes twice as long to do a piece of work as it should, you lose. Sometimes employees go into "work to rule" mode - where they work but with "reduced enthusiasm" and in a way that lowers productivity or damages the business in other ways. These employees need to go home. When they cease to contribute positively to your business, they need to go home.

You need to have a good idea what is going on in your business when you are not there. You can do this with cameras or you can get friends to call the business or visit the business when you are not there. Then you can get a better idea what is happening with your business.

Too many employees show you a good face but try to destroy the business that is paying their salaries when the owner is not around. I see this every day.

Every employee in the Bahamas seems to want a business of their own. Many decide to go into the business that their employers operate. Then they want to use their employers resources to operate their business. When a customer goes to the business where they are employed they are busy telling the customer how they can do it for less later.

This whole country is failing because it is difficult to find people who will go to work and perform honestly every day. If I were to advise anyone about going into business I would suggest to get into something that you can do by yourself. If you are married, then look at a business you can do with your spouse.

With FTAA perhaps we can look forward to an enlarged labour pool that will allow businesses to be more productive and competitive.

The top levels of business are responsible for planning, monitoring, and controlling. Too often in the Bahamas the top level of business has to be involved in operating. The employees at the operating levels are asking why the business leaders are not doing the "hard work". Everybody wants to be doing the same thing. One of my employees told me the other day he did not see why I couldn't help him do his work. That means that after hours when he is gone I should stay behind and do the work required to lead the business.

We need a renewal of thinking in the Bahamas. Our attitudes need adjusting - and not just the employees; but employers. Business owners need to realize that they have to pay for services. If someone offers me a service and I cannot afford it I have learnt to say, "it is too rich for me". Either I get the service elswhere or I do without it. I do not try to beat a person's price down. I have a saying in our office that says: "For Half The Price, We Will Half-Finish The Job".

As a small business owner you are the buyer and seller of products and services. If anything is making a negative impact on your business, you need to discontinue that as soon as possible.

The phone. Every small business owner needs a phone logger. A phone logger logs all the calls made to and from your phone and records the time the person was on the phone. You can see who is spending how much time on the phone and with a few calls you can determine whether the matters were anything to do with your business. If they were on the phone for an hour, you know it had nothing to do with your business.

Employees who make unauthorized long distance calls on your phone are actually stealing. Employees who borrow your assets without your general or specific permission are actually stealing. You need ways to be aware of this. Spot inventory checks are useful.

We need to continue this dialogue with a view to improving the work ethic in the Bahamas so we can avhieve better business performance. Better business performance means more jobs and better paying jobs. It also means a better and stronger economy.