02/03/2020
What would you do to protect your employees—and your entire organisation—from a destructive, dangerous threat to your productivity and your bottom line? We’re talking about online gambling: a serious (though often overlooked) risk confronting your business.
It’s no natural disaster or cyber-attack, but online gambling is one of the costliest threats to contemporary commerce. In fact, gambling addiction costs the UK economy more than 1.2 billion pounds yearly.
This behaviour facilitates numerous dangers for your business and your staff, including:
Lost time & productivity: The average gambler will lose more than seven hours of work time each month as a result of their addiction. This dramatically impacts your entire team’s effectiveness in the workplace, costing the organisation time and resources as employees lose focus.
Employee Wellbeing: Gambling addiction is associated with numerous negative effects on the victim’s mental health, including depression, loss of motivation, and withdrawal from social situations. This further impacts the individual’s performance and ability to interact with team members.
Crime: 23 percent of adults who underwent treatment for gambling problems admitted to committing fraud or some other financial crime to secure money for their habit. In many cases, this takes the form of theft or embezzlement from one’s employer.
Take Steps to Protect Your Business
Online gambling, both in the workplace and at home, is a major risk hiding in plain sight. Given that one in three cases of embezzlement involve perpetrators suffering from this addiction, it’s clear that online gambling is a liability you can’t afford to ignore.
Fortunately, there are steps you can take to address this issue and ensure the productivity and wellbeing of your employees:
Implement the Right Policies: Establish a clear, concrete policy against gambling of any sort in the workplace. This will give you a formal basis for any necessary disciplinary action and help foment a workplace culture that does not tolerate such practices.
Divide Responsibilities: Don’t put too much responsibility for the company’s finances in one individual. Instead, divide all bookkeeping activity between multiple parties and perform regular audits to detect fraud or any other suspicious activity.
Identify Warning Signs: Learn to identify the trademarks of an individual with a gambling problem. These can include asking for regular advances, borrowing money, arguing about money with co-workers, or requesting additional pay in lieu of vacation or sick time.
Prevention Is the Answer
The above steps may help protect your business against loss resulting from online gambling; however, they are largely reactive solutions. Knowing the warning signs of an employee suffering from gambling addiction or dividing responsibilities cannot address the core issue: the impulse to gamble in the first place.
The best solution is one that prevents a problem rather than mitigating the damage once it’s already been done. Gamban enables you to go beyond discouraging gambling and trying to identify potential problems. Now, you can eliminate online gambling entirely, both at home and in the workplace.
While other services offer expensive, ineffective products that fail to speak to the problem of online gambling itself, Gamban provides the cross-platform solution you need to minimise risk and ensure productivity. Adopt the tools you need to protect your staff and eliminate risk to your business productivity today.
For more information on how Gamban can help your organisation please visit: https://gamban.com/contact/enterprise
