What would you do?

You have an office policy of paying for parking tickets your employees get while they’re on the job. It helps ease their stress when they’re working overtime or you keep them late and they don’t have time to go down and extend their parking.

This helps them focus on work and the ROI makes it worth it.

The way it works is the employee gives the parking ticket to your office manager, and they usually get paid without you even hearing about them. It works on an honor system and you don’t worry about it too much.

But one day, you completely by accident catch an employee handing in a parking ticket… for a different parking zone… on a day she didn’t work for you!!!

You’re almost flabbergasted to see this happen. It’s so bold-faced that you don’t know what to do or how to handle it. But there’s more…

She’s exactly who you would have expected to do this.

As a general rule, if someone thinks they are worth more than they are getting paid, they will find a way to close that gap… pretty fast.

And it looks like she is doing exactly that. This is all after you had a gentle conversation with her about logging out her time if she was going to go on hour shopping breaks in the middle of the day, as that isn’t the same as having a sandwich in the back office and then getting back to work.

The real problem?

You can’t actually fire her. You need her. There is NO ONE else.

Her ripping you off is still better than you being forced to say “no” to work because of staffing issues.

Say you were in this situation. What would you do?

This is a completely real, not made-up story of something that happened to a business owner I know.

I was flabbergasted to hear it. But this once again goes to the point I’ve been making for months:

There are symptoms and problems. This story is a symptom. The problem is you are struggling to hire quality people so you have to deal with someone who is essentially stealing from you and your family.

Whether you fire them or not isn’t important. It’s that you are in a poor negotiating position and have a thin hiring pool.

Fixing this problem is multivariate and every business owner has a different way of approaching it.

Maybe you have a more aggressive style of leadership and all the advice you’re getting is for a laissez-faire management style. Maybe you have very little energy for your employees and it’s been difficult to care about what they’re complaining about. Maybe it’s any of the dozens of other management problems you could have.

The point is, there are a lot of answers that can help you out there!