Stand By Your Brand: HR and Corporate Reputation Management

The vital part that HR professionals play in helping to maintain and improve the brands of their companies is greatly underestimated.  Marketing and public relations get most of the credit (or blame!) for managing corporate reputations.  Yet HR has a central role in managing a reputation and brand that either attracts or repels job candidates, employees and customers. 

Consider the wound to a company’s reputation that is caused when a layoff is handled badly.  Those laid off will be upset and may seek legal redress.  The attendant negative publicity, spread virally on blogs, Twitter and in other social media, can tarnish the employer’s brand and create embarrassment.    

Painful reputational consequences and their associated impacts on the bottom line include: 

• EEOC complaints = Litigation, settlement costs
• Disengagement of survivors = Lower productivity, lower rates of retention
• Alienation of customers = Erosion of market share
• Greater difficulty in recruiting key candidates = Higher recruiting costs
• Lengthy reputation recovery period = All of the above plus costs of reputation recovery campaign

Preventing these problems and costs and, more affirmatively, creating a positive employer brand that will create a differential competitive advantage is a real opportunity for HR practitioners to build their company’s reputation while enhancing their own professional credibility.  Being able to make a strong business case to senior management is essential and a helpful reference with real world examples is Kevin Jackson’s Building Reputational Capital: Strategies for Integrity and Fair Play that Improve the Bottom Line.  Jackson has called a positive reputation, “the most overlooked intangible asset that a business has.”