When employees become so disillusioned they turn into whistleblowers, their ability to cause reputational damage should not be underestimated.
Let's explore why employees are the forgotten stakeholder group when it comes to reputation risk, and why it is harder to manage and track reputation risk from within.
When accusations come from internal voices, they have a lot more credibility since employees are deemed to have inside knowledge on what the company is actually up to.
Monitoring employees' conversations on corporate channels, such as the intranet or Slack, is perceived as intrusive. Privacy is sensitive and employers should be careful about when it is ok to monitor online internal conversation and when it will be perceived as crossing a line (even if it is legal).
An employee breaking ranks with management is juicy gossip which makes for good click bait in traditional and social channels. This helps these stories go viral.
Most companies have poorly defined processes for collecting and analyzing reputation risk from internal stakeholder groups.
What to do about it?
The formula is pretty simple - take employee concerns seriously and review their feedback in context with other reputation data inputs.
Employees are often a first line of defense against reputation risk. Feedback loops, fireside chats and having an open door policy can mitigate a lot of blow back if this channel is respected.
Active monitoring of open, enterprise wide chats and forums to watch for themes and trends is another way to understand what is top of mind for employees.
Assessment of overall reputation risk should reflect the information collected through internal channels and considered alongside external stakeholder groups. While more qualitative than quantitative, these channels are treasure troves of reputational insight and should be incorporated into any robust reputation management system.
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