Which is Worse: A Damaged Reputation or the Loss of a Key Employee?

Which is Worse: A Damaged Reputation or the Loss of a Key Employee?

This man isn't sure yet...but he'll know soon enough.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

Would your company suffer more from the loss of a key employee, someone who hit his numbers every month, has an exemplary track record with his clients, or whose visionary ideas helped shape the company – or a tarnished reputation brought on by an unforgivable social gaffe or, worse, a data breach revealing the personal information of countless customers?

In order to examine this fully, we’ll need to break it down into smaller pieces: The benefits of having a top-of-class employee working for you, and the negative effects of losing such a person in your workforce.  And, we’ll need to look at the payoff of having a great reputation versus the deleterious effects of having a bad one.

Benefits Brought by a Key Employee

Having a good employee at your disposal obviously carries a string of benefits. 

The work he’s assigned gets done, and, not just that – it’s meaningful to the company, so it ends up bringing in appreciable revenue, revenue which certainly would not have arrived if that employee hadn’t contributed his work. 

Having such an employee can also mean entirely new ideas for your company, from website tweaks that positively affect traffic and search engine ranking to an entirely new, successful product line. 

The possibilities are great.

Bad Effects of Losing that Key Employee

Conversely, what happens when that same employee that created all the extra revenue and had ideas no one else could muster ends up leaving your company?

Certainly you can ride on his ghostly laurels for a time.  But, after that time, you’ll start to see a decrease in revenue because the production that key employee brought to the table simply isn’t there.

 

In time, after the key employee leaves, you might have some vestigial remains of his handiwork (such as that tweaked website you’ve told his successor not to touch) or the new product line that someone else oversees, but you won’t get the innovation back.

In short, you’ll return close to the productivity and revenue levels you were at before.  Your current clients might not notice much – maybe a different voice on the phone – but, you will.

Benefits Earned by a Great Reputation

Good reputation, on the other hand, can be thought of as something that happens when you have a good employee working for you. 

You garner a good reputation when someone visits the website that your star employee helped revamp and has a much easier time checking out and paying for his order.  He might tell his friends how easy it was, and he might even mention how you seem to have diversified your product lines, too.  He might write a review on Yelp, for that matter.  But, the principle is the same.  Good reputation comes from people saying good things about you.

The good thing about good reputation is it outlasts your star employees.  Whereas your influx of keen ideas might slow to a halt if your star producer leaves, people will remember how they felt when they read his work, when they surfed on his website, or when they bought the products he conceived of.  And, they’ll come back for more.

Negative Effects of a Bad Reputation

And, conversely, as good as the effects of a sparkling reputation can be, the effects of a lousy one can be exactly as bad.  And, usually worse. 

You might inadvertently plant a seed of bad reputation by making a faux pas at a large social gathering for your business.  By comparison, you might plant a sequoia grove by inadvertently compromising your customers’ data in a data breach.

Now, we’ve all read negative reviews on Yelp.  Those reviews are the ones that seem to stick the most, and the ones that seem to arouse the most passion.  Without going into the psychology behind it, let it suffice to say bad reputation is a much bigger worry than good reputation is a boon.  Whereas people interpret your good reputation to mean you’ve done mostly good things, people usually interpret a bad reputation to mean anyone’s given experience with you will be unequivocally bad.  No bones about it.

And, what’s more is the fact that a good reputation can easily shift to bad, but a bad reputation has a much harder time turning over to good once more.  A bad reputation outlasts your star employees and your bad apples, too.

So, Which is Worse?  Losing a Key Employee or a Damaged Reputation?

After reading this article, hopefully the answer is clear as day. 

Losing an essential employee might look bad on paper, but you’ll not only retain a good deal of his innovations (in some cases), but you won’t be thought of negatively just because of his loss.  You might be thought of…not quite as well.  But, not badly.

If your reputation’s tarnished, though, forget about it.

Negative reviews on Yelp live on forever, and people glom onto those juicy, bad stories much more than they do positive ones.  I mean, what captivates us when we read books?  See movies?

It’s the conflict.  It excites us.  We can use it to our advantage, of course (for example, avoiding a place that has horrid reviews on Yelp), but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re drawn to it.

That’s just how it is.

How Can You Protect Yourself?

Believe it or not, this article shouldn’t read like a death sentence.  It’s very possible to garner a good reputation and keep it that way.  You just have to be smart.

If that means calculating more heavily what you say in social situations, so be it.  If it means turning the other cheek when someone calls you a name instead of flying off the handle, you can handle it.  If it means investing time into looking into a tokenized security solution - or any number of other data security measures -  for your customers’ secure information, it’s worth looking into.