Young workers in the United States are twice as likely as older colleagues to steal office supplies for home use without thinking it is wrong, a new study says.
And all those missing paper clips and pens add up to more than $50 billion a year.
One in five workers age 18 to 24 did not feel it was wrong to take home office supplies, said the Spherion Workplace Snapshot, an online survey.
Among those young workers, one in four said they had taken supplies home in the past year, the survey said. By contrast, only 8 percent of workers age 65 and up said they did not feel such appropriation was wrong, and just 12 percent of older workers said they took supplies.
“That’s just how many people admit it,” said John Case, head of Employeetheft.com, a security consulting firm based in Del Mar, California.
The Spherion survey of 1,630 employed U.S. adults was taken in early April and released this month.
“A lot of people that steal don’t consider it stealing. They just consider it taking things or that it’s a fringe benefit,” Case said.
More senior workers may help themselves to supplies unwittingly because they may be likely to take work home after hours, said Brent Short, managing director of Spherion Professional Services, a staffing and recruiting company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“It might be a bit of ’I’m going to take this home to do my work,”’ he said.
Overall, 18 percent of survey respondents said they had taken home supplies. Seventy-one percent said it was wrong.
Earlier studies have shown more than half of office workers have taken supplies for personal use. Those studies also have shown the most commonly stolen items are pens, followed by self-adhesive note pads and paper clips.
Experts note paper and pens tend to disappear from office supply shelves when schools open in September and office tape dispensers disappear at holiday gift-wrapping time.
“Those things add up. If there’s 25 people in an office and they are all taking something, whether purposely or not, these are the things that can impact a business from a cost perspective,” said Short.
Employees steal more than $1 billion worth of goods from their employers each week, costing U.S. businesses some $52 billion a year, Case estimated.
Younger employees may be more likely to take supplies because they are more apt to leave their jobs and so don’t worry as much about losing those jobs, experts said.
“I think we’re in a different era. People move from company to company much more rapidly. There’s less guilt, because they don’t feel as much a part of the organization as they used to,” said John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., workplace and business trend consultants based in Chicago.
However, in dollar value, older workers may take more costly supplies because as senior employees they may have easier access, less supervision and more ways to cover up such a theft, Case added.
