Could politeness be harming your business

Managing expenses seem easy when it’s printed on a policy document.

But the challenge with expense management isn’t creating a great policy - it’s making that policy work in the real world. In a complex business landscape - a shifting interplay of people, power, structures, and status.

It’s in this mix that finance professionals are faced with carrying out a critical task - to challenge suspicious expenses claims.

It’s an essential requirement but it’s also the one area finance professionals are likely to find most awkward and uncomfortable - especially if it’s a senior manager they need to question.

To challenge a colleague clashes with many of those aspects we associate with British business etiquette - a sense of politeness, respect for rank and not wanting to ‘rock the boat’.

But what effect could this reticence be having on the way businesses manage their expenses? Could our inclination to avoid conflict be contributing to the 100 million annual losses from exaggerated and falsified expense claims?

This was the motivation behind the research work you will find presented in this report. We will first take an in-depth look at the findings of the survey and then look at how understanding the problem can help businesses to tackle the problem:

• Research Findings
• Explaining Expenses Awkwardness
• Digital Management - A New Approach

Research findings

It seems strange that there has been so little research into the way companies challenge expenses, given that it plays such a vital role in protecting businesses against losses and Fraud.

But it may be linked to the nature of the problem itself - that research involves talking about internal issues of status and power; things which employees may find difficult to open up about.

The research commissioned for this report, therefore, provided complete anonymity to all of the 1,042 managers and finance professionals who were quizzed for the survey.

The results help to reveal the true scale of the problem caused by employees being too afraid to challenge colleagues.

The survey asked people to name the specific areas where they had failed to challenge suspicious actions of employees. Among the most common answers were:

One notable aspect of the research findings was that there appeared to be no significant differences in the attitudes displayed by male and female managers. They were similarly reluctant to confront colleagues.

Explaining expenses awkwardness

So why do we find it so hard to challenge suspicious actions in the workplace?

While the social and cultural factors influencing British ‘politeness’ are beyond the scope of this report, we can explore how these attitudes have taken root in the world of expenses.

If you look at the traditional way expenses have been managed by British businesses, you find a structure that is largely dependent on trust. The ‘analog’ world of scrunched up receipts, mileage guesstimates, and handwritten bills creates ‘grey areas’ in which validating paper expenses is time-consuming and inaccurate.

Finance teams have had little option other than to trust the honesty of their employees. It meant that challenging a claim was to suggest that an employee was untrustworthy. It’s the lack of information that has helped turn expenses into such a toxic area of
the business world - a breeding ground for false and exaggerated expenses. Instead of challenging claims, finance teams have learned to turn a blind eye. But thankfully this is a problem which has a solution.

Digital expenses solution

Expenses management is no longer reliant on employee trust.

New digital systems transform the way businesses are able to manage and monitor their employees’ expenses. The old ‘analog’ ways of working are being replaced by faster and more efficient automated systems.

These combine ‘cloud’ technology with the power of consumer-level smartphones to provide finance teams with a much more effective way to handle expenses. It strips away those ‘grey areas’ where expenses fraud previously existed.

The way forward

The migration to digital management systems provides a way forward for those companies who continue to struggle against expenses fraud. The technology provides businesses with the confidence to start properly challenging employees...