What Is Pencil Whipping? (And How to Stop It)

Remember directly scrolling to the end of the terms and conditions to hit the agree button the last time you signed up for a service? Just like us, employees sometimes assume everything’s in order or simply don’t have enough bandwidth for due diligence, leading them to sign off on work that wasn’t completed.

That’s called pencil whipping, and it has consequences. In this guide, we explain what pencil whipping means and how you can prevent it at your company.

What Is Pencil Whipping?

Pencil whipping is a term used when someone signs off on work that was never completed.

Suppose you’re a manufacturer that requires production workers to go through a quality control checklist for each product batch. But instead of actually doing the quality checks, the operator just ticks off everything at the end of the shift. Imagine this operator skipped a critical safety inspection, and a faulty batch of products makes it to your customers.

Best case scenario? You’re flooded with returns and lose a ton of money. Worst case? Some of the customers get hurt, and your company is on the hook for a massive lawsuit. All because the operator couldn’t be bothered to do their job right.

Scenarios That Are Prone to Pencil Whipping

In most cases, pencil whipping occurs because of one or more of the following issues:

• Lack of time: Your staff might be overwhelmed with unrealistic deadlines. Alternatively, employees with poor time management skills might find themselves pencil whipping to keep up against the racing clock.
• Team’s spread thin: Pencil whipping is inevitable when a team is stretched thin trying to do more with less. What do you think will happen when the quality control team needs to inspect every product that comes off the line but is only given half the staff needed to do it properly?
• Lack of training: Employees who aren’t trained well might underestimate the importance of completing the tasks they’re supposed to complete. This leads them to pencil whip out of ignorance, not realizing the consequences of their actions.
• Pressure from management: Sometimes, management’s excessive focus on hitting certain quotas tells employees that numbers are all that matter. This leads to pencil whipping becoming an unspoken norm.

These reasons can compel your employees to cut corners, no matter which process they’re dealing with. However, here are the most common scenarios where pencil whipping happens the most:

• Inventory checks and asset management: Counting and recording inventory is tedious, but employees might fudge the data just because there’s pressure to hit the numbers. They might estimate inventory counts or just copy previous counts, leading to inventory management discrepancies that can disrupt production schedules and cause stockouts.
• Scheduled equipment inspections or maintenance checks: Equipment maintenance is critical to keeping your machinery running smoothly. But preventive maintenance schedules don’t mean much if employees just fill out maintenance logs without doing any real work. Pencil whipping in this area can lead to equipment breakdowns and costly unplanned downtime or idle time.
• Safety procedures and checks: Safety checks typically involve inspections of equipment, safety gear and work environments. It’s easy to imagine what might happen if employees rush through or skip these tasks. One severe accident or regulatory compliance violation could result in injury for a valued team member. Your company might even have to deal with a lawsuit and loss of reputation.
• Training certifications: Maintenance team employees are sometimes marked as trained or certified without completing the required coursework or assessments. This puts both your team and the company at risk.

Consequences of Pencil Whipping

Pencil whipping might feel like a quick fix, but it’s a ticking time bomb. Consequences range from minor hiccups to catastrophic equipment failures that can cripple your company. Here are some examples:

Termination of Employment

Management may decide to terminate your employment contract if you’re found guilty of pencil whipping. This information could also go on record and make it harder for you to find work elsewhere.

Prosecution

Team members involved in pencil whipping might face prosecution, especially when it involves falsified safety records, compliance documents and environmental reports. In some jurisdictions, executives and safety managers who directly participated or turned a blind eye to pencil whipping might be held criminally liable.

Third-Party Legal Liability

Customers, suppliers or the general public might hold your company liable if pencil whipping leads to defective products, safety failures or environmental damage. They might sue the company for negligence, which often leads to hefty penalties, especially if the case turns into a class-action lawsuit.

How to Stop Pencil Whipping

A bit of due diligence can help you prevent pencil whipping. Here are a few ways to stop pencil whipping before it turns into a major problem:

• Talk to employees: Bring up the topic of pencil whipping regularly during team meetings. Acknowledge that your team might feel pressured to pencil whip because of a high workload or unrealistic expectations. Let them know you’re open to listening to their concerns and why pencil whipping isn’t an appropriate way to deal with them.
• Instigate random checks: Random checks are a powerful deterrent against pencil whipping. If your team members know they can get checked, they’re far less likely to cut corners. Random checks can take many forms — you can conduct random audits, spot checks on specific processes or implement software that can help you monitor work requests in real-time.
• Do away with quotas and management pressure: Consider eliminating quotas and switching to flexible targets that account for variations in workflow, such as a shift in the complexity of the task. This creates a more realistic and manageable workload, reducing the need to pencil whip.
• Follow your CMMS software: A computerized maintenance management system software (CMMS) software tracks and sets up automations for maintenance tasks. You and authorized maintenance operations members get a real-time view of work orders that are updated in real-time as technicians work on them. Active monitoring acts as a strong incentive not to pencil whip.

How Coast Can Help Prevent Pencil Whipping

Coast acts as a centralized hub that can streamline your maintenance processes and help you keep pencil whipping in check through complete visibility over processes and improved communication.

With Coast, you’ll be able to see which maintenance technicians have a full plate and which ones have availability for more work orders as well as send maintenance schedule notifications directly to their mobile device. This helps you set reasonable timelines and avoid performance pressure.

When you create and assign work orders to a technician using Coast, it appears on your dashboard. When the technician completes the work order, you’re notified about it. If the technician has questions, they can reach out for help via chat within the work order itself. You can even add instructions to work orders, and where needed, you can explicitly state the consequences of pencil whipping.

If you’ve been dealing with pencil whipping, check out Coast’s pricing — it’s free to try!