The CIPR conference on reputation yesterday primarily focused on strategy rather than tactics; the mindset needed to cope with reputational challenges facing companies today. A recurring theme throughout the event was employee engagement.

That an event concerned with external perception focused so heavily on internal engagement might seem strange, but the point reiterated time and again by speakers was the importance of getting employees on-side. Rupert Younger, director of Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and chair for the day put it neatly: “You can’t manage reputation as you don’t own it; you can engage reputation through influence and behaviour strategies”

In other words, control what you can to influence perception. Employees are a powerful potential advocate base, under engaged and under utilised by many companies at the moment. Claire Cater of Bell Pottinger, group lead on the Big Society and Behaviour change project believes the balance of spend for internal comms/external comms should be 60/40 in favour of internal. She suggested companies profile staff in the same way they do consumers to better assess how to engage them.

Not only do employees carry a brand’s reputation while at work, they do so out of work too. This is particularly apparent in the online environment, where an individual staff member’s reach has grown exponentially over the past decade. Ensuring that employees are privy to important information and aligned with the brand narrative means they can act as reputation protectors online, sensing discontent and quelling crises before they get out of hand.

Younger also questioned the idea of talking about reputation in the singular.“There is no such thing as generalised perception, companies have multiple reputations; a reputation for something with someone.” He used the example of Goldman Sachs, loathed by many for putting profit ahead of morals yet it need only post a small job advert on its website to get a flood of CVs, such is its reputation as a recruiter.

That we each perceive companies differently and that our perception is largely contextual is common sense, but often overlooked. The take home messages from the presenters tacitly assumed the contingencies of reputation, although Sandra Macleod, Group CEO of Echo Research talked of gauging the financial value of reputation through a ‘reputation dividend’. Broadly speaking, though, all presenters agreed companies must be open and transparent, and do rather than talk about doing.

The second point here is really an extension of the first, and both boil down to one thing: authenticity.  The more authentic a company is the more cohered peoples’ perceptions of that company will be regardless of context. If a company is consistent in the way it talks to its staff and to the public, and in what it says it will do and what it does, then its reputation(s) will benefit.

Tags: cipr, claire cater, hugh jordan, Reputation conference, Rupert Younger, Sandra Macleod