In today’s highly competitive atmosphere, businesses face serious risks to their continuity and profitability from data loss, cyberattacks, mismanagement, accidents, and litigation. Organizations that survive these challenges can still suffer financial losses for years as a result of the damage done to their brand and reputation in the market.
The impact of brand and reputational damage involves more than mere public relations crises. When a company’s name becomes associated with a financial scandal, insider misconduct, negligence, malfeasance, or workplace violence, the fallout often includes erosion in customer trust and stock price volatility. It may take years before the brand can shed the connection to the negative event in the public’s perception.
Avoiding Exposure from Reputational Damage
Protecting a brand from avoidable reputational damage requires an effective and comprehensive risk mitigation plan that includes prudent hiring and personnel management policies. Having the right systems in place, pre- and post-hire, can provide valuable insights that help executives keep a finger on the pulse of public perception when workers misstep, on or off the job.
With the power and speed of social media able to distribute sensational news across the globe within minutes, an employee’s bad act can light a company’s public reputation on fire.
One of the starkest examples of this phenomenon involved a well-known, global gig company that suffered reverberating brand damage when public reports and social media revealed that its workers had physically assaulted several customers. The damage caused the company to lose over one-billion dollars of revenue and its hard-earned, long-standing reputation as a smart, convenient, low-cost option.
As a result, the company’s executives realized that conducting a one-time, pre-hire background screening of its drivers was an ineffective means of maintaining a safe, trustworthy workforce. The cost of instituting a continual employee screening program was di minimis compared with the company’s losses.
Implementing a Culture of Integrity and Workforce Character
Shareholders, customers, suppliers and other employees all expect an organization’s leaders to uphold the highest ethical standards. Demonstrating exemplary conduct enables management to demand equally honorable behavior from the entire workforce. Employees who know their off-hours conduct could compromise their standing in the company are less likely to engage in illegal activity.
Character counts. Establishing a culture of integrity is a basic requirement for a company’s leadership to build a workforce conscious of its obligations to honor the brand’s reputation. The organizations most likely to escape serious brand and reputational damage from an insider’s malicious or negligent conduct are those that prepare comprehensive risk mitigation and response plans. These threat prevention plans must recognize that damage to the brand can arise from a company’s own actions, from its employees, or from third parties with whom it is associated – such as contractors or consultants that represent your brand.
Managing Brand Through Team Member Risk Assessment
Most successful organizations expend great effort in hiring the best, most qualified candidates to become part of the team. A key step in responsible hiring decisions is screening the backgrounds of job candidates. Just as screening the backgrounds of new hires is a necessary part of onboarding team members, contracting for post-hire continuous employee screening services is essential to maintaining the company’s awareness of workers’ off-duty conduct resulting in criminal charges.
An unremarkable pre-hire background screening report reveals only arrests as of the screening date. But the lives of employees do not remain stagnant, they develop in response to new pressures, stresses, illness, and other influences. A well-qualified job candidate with an impeccable background can develop personal issues over time that create serious risk to their employer’s brand and reputation.
DUI or drug possession arrests may indicate that a worker is failing to cope with personal problems that can result in poor decision-making on the job. Domestic violence arrests might signal an unmanaged anger issue and potential workplace violence. Financial crimes involving bad checks, credit card fraud, or tax-related charges suggest the security of the company’s data or other assets could be in jeopardy of theft or misuse.
Protecting Your Brand and Reputation
PostHire provides accurate, near-real-time notification of employees’ arrests 24 hours a day to designated company officers no matter where the arrest occurs in the United States.
No company is immune from these threats. Continually assessing the vulnerabilities of an organization requires the continued monitoring of changing levels of risk. As workers’ lives change and become more complicated by family dynamics, divorce, financial pressure, illness, or personal resentment, their off-work conduct can become drastically different from the behavior patterns reflected in their pre-hire screening report.
Protecting your company from brand and reputational damage requires proactive measures enabling security and risk mitigation executives to preempt the eruption of ethical disasters and worker misconduct.
PostHire employs a unique, proprietary search and quality control protocol that delivers more accurate, reliable, and actionable information about workforce arrests and prosecutions than any other provider in the industry. Each PostHire client selects its desired notification frequency and collaborates in customizing the screening level and search criteria that fits their needs.
To discuss a customized workforce assessment plan for your organization, contact PostHire today.
