What to do about bad Glassdoor reviews?

Written by Technically Media CEO Chris Wink, Technical.ly’s Culture Builder newsletter features tips on growing powerful teams and dynamic workplaces. Below is the latest edition we published. Sign up to get the next one.

Want to hear the worst response I ever saw to a flood of bad Glassdoor reviews? A flood of faked positive ones.

Last fall, accusations of mismanagement and turnover at a tourism agency spilled over onto an array of employer reputation management sites. Among my favorite critiques: “This is the most broken environment I’ve ever worked in, and I came from a startup.”

The Technical.ly newsroom frequently uses employer reputation management websites as a lagging indicator of possible workplace turmoil. While any company that is big enough or has been around long enough will have its critics, enough smoke suggests fire — though anonymous tips are still more helpful.

By the time the symptoms show up online, the virus is already spreading.

This is never more important than during a tight labor market, like now. A generational shift of workplace priorities matters too. Glassdoor, for one, says 10 million Gen Z and Millennial users rank a company’s culture and values as at least as important as benefits and perks. Regardless of generation, Glassdoor estimates that people read an average of seven reviews while forming an opinion of a company. If your organization is experiencing significant turnover and needs to attract prospective employees, you can’t afford to ignore reputation management.

The history of reputation management

“Reputation” is an old word that describes a concept that is likely as old as human society. We’re social beings, so we have always made decisions about our in-group through gossip and storytelling. This social concept quickly came into a business setting as modern workplace dynamics developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Workers shared stories of their workplace conditions with others, and especially inventive businesses found that data collection could improve their performance. So-called employee-attitude surveys became popular at manufacturers in the 1920s.

In the 1930s, “The Negro Motorist Green Book” became a crucial travel tool, and remains a chilling artifact of the variability of American business prejudice: a guide book to help Black Americans navigate the restaurants, hotels and services that were more or less unwelcoming.

After World War II, a competitive labor market accelerated the use of employee surveys. On the employee side, in 1954, more than a third of all working Americans were unionized, giving employees a kind of tool for sharing and shaping employer reputation.

In the late 20th century, employers professionalized standards like exit interviews, performance reviews and staff surveys to better understand their reputations — and to change their behaviors and policies, in theory at least. Then, as in so many ways, the internet accelerated change.

Just as unionization declined and American workplaces professionalized, email and message boards brought communication costs down and sped the transfer of what was happening inside companies. The advent of the social web in the early 21st century made that process public. Though there were earlier experiments, Glassdoor, founded in 2007, helped bring online reputation management (ORM) to the mainstream. By 2018, it was acquired for $1.2 billion by Recruit Holdings, the Tokyo-based HR tech and recruiting giant that also owns Indeed.

What is employer reputation management?

Simply put, employer reputation management is the act of understanding and influencing what former, current and prospective employees say about what it’s like to work at your company.

“It’s a great opportunity more than anything else,” said Megan Huey, a people ops professional and veteran of various growth-stage tech companies. “Having that opportunity to respond at least gives you a seat at the table.”

Glassdoor may have helped popularize and modernize ORM, but it’s not alone. Sites like Comparably, Blind and Fishbowl, which Glassdoor acquired last year, all put their own spin on the same concept: Allow anonymity to encourage honest feedback from current or former employees. Huey adds that Reddit threads and other social media platforms round out the most common portfolio of ORM for employers to consider.

Anonymity naturally brings criticism about fraudulence, and Glassdoor combats that. Frequent investigations show that employers, too, attempt to influence their rankings by encouraging satisfied employees to post — and pushing into more ethically-questionable practices.

The point, though, is that your company’s employer brand is being shaped with or without your permission. Employer reputation management is a strategy to do something about that.

What do you do about negative Glassdoor reviews?

Huey recommends a triage when a negative review about working at your company comes in.

“Is this an indication of a much larger systemic thing?” Huey asks. “Or does it seem like an isolated case in which someone’s expectations were not met?”

“You don’t necessarily have to agree with them,” she adds. But she does recommend responding quickly and with humanizing language to all criticisms. How you respond may be as important as what you’re responding to.

“Remember that current and future employees may be watching whatever you say,” Huey said. Unless a critic is posting something egregiously inaccurate, denying criticism point by point is likely unproductive. Remember that reputation management is related to, but very different from, formal human resources management, in which issues of legality, compliance and policy are chiefly important. ORM is a kind of marketing.

For general comments like “this is not a good place to work,” there really isn’t much to do, Huey said, other than acknowledge that someone had a negative experience.

“Not everyone is going to like working at your company,” Huey said. “Use humanizing language. You’re engaging with a person, not writing a policy.”

Get more team leaders involved in addressing criticisms online — and internally. “If you say people matter at your company, why is only people ops responding?” Huey said.

How to improve your company’s employer reputation and Glassdoor reviews

Bad Glassdoor reviews are a symptom, not a cause. You do have to address any core issues that continue to resurface. Ideally, you’d find these problems before they go public, through devices like performance reviews and staff surveys. If you’re confronting public criticism for issues you feel like you’ve already solved for, then address what public criticism you can, but know that there are limits.

“You can’t over-rotate to what everyone is saying,” Huey said. “Chasing the reviews down every corner of the internet is impossible.”

It is common to encourage satisfied employees to post their own reviews, but you are also limited here. Push too hard and you might not like what you get. “I’m here because my boss told me I had to” is worse than no review at all.

If a teammate offers up a positive experience, ask them to consider sharing that experience on a public site. If employees leave in a positive way, ask if they’d feel comfortable sharing that experience.

This is where employer brand marketing typically enters. If your employer value proposition really connects with your highest-performing teammates, then go tell that story. We at Technical.ly help clients do that work, and there’s lots you can do on your own.

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None of this matters if you have deeper issues at your company, though. “Reversing the internal toxicity is your first priority,” Huey said.

The worst thing you can do is to try to hide from very real issues — like that tourism agency. When a source flagged for us that a flurry of overly-positive reviews with similar language had been posted to the agency’s Glassdoor, I was suspicious too, but I had to ask: How do you know they’re fake?

Well, the source pointed out, at least one of the positive reviews literally referenced a different company name — it was copied from another Glassdoor account entirely. That someone had to plagiarize praise tells you everything you need to know about the state of that organization’s culture. That’s a place no one wants to be.