Does publicity affect Personal Grievances?
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What role does the rest of the world play in a PG? Not much, but it does a little bit, so it’s worth considering. The elephant in the room of PGs is reputation. I discuss here how a PG may damage your reputation and future career prospects, but it goes both ways- your employer has a reputation, and that’s a factor in play, so let’s work our way through all the aspects of this.
Will it be googleable?
This is where everybody is worried, and it’s a bit of game of chicken about who cares more. Typically if it goes to court, the decision will be published including the employer’s and employee’s names. This is where employees get worried that prospective employers can discover the case with a simple google search. I can’t guarantee this will or won’t happen, but it can be a factor in whether the employee settles or goes to court.
Will it be in the media?
Most companies assign a fiscal value to their brand, and bad publicity can do actual financial damage. The worst-case outcome for the employer is being found at fault, and that it will be picked up by the media, resulting in real financial loss to the brand, and potential diminished future sales. However, most mainstream media avoids employment cases, so as a rule they don’t report, or if they do they don’t take sides. If your case is particularly juicy or topical the chances of media interest might go up, but don’t bank on it.
How at risk is the employer’s brand?
How big the risk is depends on the nature of the brand. Is the company name the same as the trading name? How important is their brand to their success? How often to do they go through these cases? Do they trade on ethical behaviour?
To give examples, if you’re taking a case against a brand that promotes itself as ethical (take the Body Shop as an example) their brand is more at risk than an infrastructure maintenance company who don’t sell to the general public. Some industries don’t have great reputations as a group (fast food is a good example) so companies within the industry are somewhat used to employment cases against them, so rarely baulk at the risk of bad publicity.
Marketing types hate the idea of being named in court
This is the above, but more a discussion of the psychology of the people in charge. The pathway to CEO is typically either through finance, marketing, operations, or they are the initial entrepreneur. To paint these with a very broad brush, operations types are used to a bit of robust confrontation, finance focus on the numbers, entrepreneurs take it personally, and marketing types are very adverse to bad publicity.
If there’s a chance of being in the paper, the big boss needs to know. If you know who the big boss is, and where they can from, you’ve some insight into their comfort level with going to court.
