We love entrepreneurs and the grittiness of American workers. However, some workers take advantage of the boss’s equipment to do their own side jobs. That’s both unethical and will get an employee fired. Here are some examples.
Uber in the Work Van
Yes, one of our customers, a cleaning service, added fleet tracking after noticing higher mileage than expected on a van one of the night crews was using. The crew, a team of 4, should have all been working at the one cleaning job every night. Once tracking was installed on the van, our customer quickly identified that the van was stopping briefly at the job but would then travel hundreds of miles before returning to the job site at the end of the shift. A little late-night reconnaissance by the owner allowed him to discover that one of the crew workers was using the work van to Uber throughout the night. One can only guess that these profits were shared with the other workers who never outed their co-worker who left them at the job every night…
Creative Deer Hunting
Another customer couldn’t figure out why their bucket truck kept coming back to the shop muddy. They questioned where the driver was going on a regular basis and he always had a story of a muddy road headed to a job site. However, when our new customer installed GPS tracking on their vehicles, they found the truth. Their employee was taking the bucket truck to the same piece of land over several days. Wanting to know what was going on at this location, our customer allowed the truck to stop and then showed up on the location. When they arrived, they found the bucket in the air amongst the tops of the trees and their employee in the bucket with his deer rifle and binoculars. I’m sure the employee will deer hunt again, but he’ll have to find another employer and a different deer stand.
Poaching for Gators
We had another customer report that after watching their GPS tracking on the work truck for a few weeks, they noticed their employee taking it to some very swampy areas in Louisiana. This would happen at night after the truck should be parked for the evening at the employee’s home (some employers let the employees take vehicles home at night to save time getting to the jobs). So, one night our customer decided to go to the location the truck was as at and see what was going on there. When he arrived, he found his truck with an illegally hunted alligator in the back. He called the game warden and someone to come get the truck after the alligator was removed. We aren’t sure how the former employee got home.
If you’ve had a mobile workforce for long, you probably have your own stories. We’d love to hear them at marketing@rhinofleettracking.com
