A CISO’s Guide to “Negative Megaphoning”

Principles for preventing employee comments that damage your organization’s reputation

Image by @snowshade on Unsplash

“Negative megaphoning” is when employees speak negatively about their organizations to external audiences. Employee perspectives are often considered more credible than the organization’s official statements, and this scares companies. They create policies and surveillance systems to try and control employees. Moreover, large security teams typically have at least a few dedicated staff responsible for conducting investigations on vocal employees at the direction of executives and attorneys. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about employees who leak intellectual property or violate the law by exposing regulated personal data. I mean when someone gets pissed off and talks shit about their employer on social media, to journalists, in Slack groups, social events, etc.

Negative megaphoning can have a significant impact on the reputation of your company as well as specific teams, like #infosec. It may seem obvious that organizations want to minimize negative news headlines, but how often do CISOs think about their reputation as an employer and how that affects their ability to hire and retain talent? 

In my experience, negative megaphoning can also occur inside organizations and have serious consequences on a security team’s influence with business partners and internal stakeholders. We’ve worked with several clients on this exact issue – repairing internal perceptions and relationships in order to remove political obstacles for the security team.  

So, it’s not irrational for leaders to want to prevent reputational damage from happening in the first place. It takes a lot of time and energy to fix it. 

Here’s the crazy thing though — we know how to prevent most of this from happening and it’s not rocket science. However, it is backed by science. 😎

Research means we don’t have to guess

In April 2021, an article by Dr. Yeunjae Lee was published in the Journal of Business Ethics. Dr. Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Strategic Communication in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. She has done extensive research on employee behaviors within and outside of work in response to organizational crisis and the impacts of organizations’ strategic internal communication. 

Her article last April, summarized findings from a study she conducted showing how employees’ perception of a quality relationship with their organization reduced negative megaphoning while negative experiences promoted it. Makes sense, right?  

It’s fairly common for me to hear commentary from outside the field of communications referring to findings of such studies as “common sense” – but if that were true, Silicon Valley would stop worshiping and financing billionaires who delight in demonstrating how little common sense they have. In reality, simple principles can be easy to understand while still leaving leaders perplexed with how to implement them. 

Here are the key findings from Dr. Lee’s study:

1. Employees’ perception of quality relationships with the organization can effectively decrease employees’ negative megaphoning behaviors in anonymous online channels.

2. When employees experience negative emotions at work, such as anger, contempt, disgust, and fear, they are more likely to share bad aspects of their organization externally, internally, and on anonymous online channels (i.e., Glassdoor).

3. Employees’ negative experiences can undermine the relationship between employees and their organizations.

4. Employees’ perceptions of injustice can erode the employee-organization relationships and increase the likelihood of employees feeling anger, anxiety, or frustration.

It’s all about relationships

The relationship between individuals on your team and the organization makes a huge difference in how they react to negative experiences, while at the same time, negative experiences damage that relationship. Do you know what kind of a relationship your team members have with the organization? 

If some of this seems too simple for you, the study also identified several principles for organizations to implement to prevent or reduce negative megaphoning. At first glance, they seem pretty fundamental and perhaps even “common sense” – but then why isn’t everyone doing them? 

Why indeed. 

Here are the 3 principles for minimizing negative megaphoning by employees:

1. Treat employees with respect and dignity and offer rewards and benefits equal to their contributions

2. Identify and proactively prevent any issues that make employees feel that they are mistreated

3. Provide training interventions to help organizational leaders understand the importance of fair and just decision-making 

Putting these principles into practice requires ongoing, two-way communication between leaders and each team member, an accurate understanding of their expectations related to fairness and how decisions are made, and the simmering issues between each team member and the organization. Of course, all of this requires trust and effective communication. 

If this sounds like something you want to tackle with your team in 2023, drop us a note here.  

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