The rate-your-workplace website can be bad news for businesses – unless you’re prepared and proactive in your approach
By Robert Jeffery and Grace Lewis
If you haven’t done so already, do yourself a favour – get onto Glassdoor, type in the name of your organisation and find out what staff really think about work. If you can’t afford an employee engagement survey, it’s a revealing way of assessing morale (albeit one loaded with caveats). But it also poses a serious problem for HR departments.
Glassdoor – and rival sites such as Rate My Employer – lets employees give full vent to their feelings about their workplace, in the same way TripAdvisor services holidaymakers. Would-be hires are queuing up to use the service: with 150,000 companies covered globally, 75 million page views per month and an informal tie-up with Facebook to let you check out who’s worked at a company before you apply, its popularity is soaring, and 90 per cent of US jobseekers report reading a workplace review of a potential employer.
Glassdoor, which is marketing heavily in the UK, was discussed extensively at the CIPD annual conference and exhibition in November, including by keynote speaker Dan Pink, who hailed it as an example of “information parity” between the old elite (companies) and empowered consumers. Except not everything said on such sites is proportionate, or fair: while there is plenty of praise for good employers, there’s plenty of trash talk too. Like the major UK retailer with an “intense culture of overwork” and “exceptionally hierarchical” culture. Or the hotel chain dismissed for its “poor management” and “staff bullying”. Who knows whether the reviewer is an ex-employee with a grievance, a legitimately concerned staff member or even a malicious rival hotelier? And because Glassdoor doesn’t distinguish between localised problems and organisation-wide issues, many businesses may find themselves unfairly lambasted.
Threatening dire retribution to those who contribute to such sites (as some US employers recently have) is one way to respond. But there may be a more positive opportunity. On Unilever’s careers page, it encourages job seekers to “visit our page on Glassdoor for candidates and employee testimonials”. The company has described everyone who comments on Glassdoor as an ambassador – despite the fact not every review is 100 per cent flattering.
You could also try providing an “employer response” – in the same way many hotels gain kudos for proactively replying to negative reviews. Or you could encourage your employees to find their own voice on social media, to drive workforce collaboration and win trust by being more transparent on important issues.
The CIPD report Social media and employee voice highlights the employee engagement opportunities that employer-led social media can bring, including an open channel for employees to feed views, concerns and ideas upwards, and greater knowledge sharing and innovation between employees at all levels. “Employee voice expressed through social media is much more influential because it is more likely to be heard,” says CIPD research adviser Jonny Gifford.