Anonymous employee reviews online: Responding to the Glassdoor effect – transcript

The following is a transcript of an interview with Karen Mitra, Senior Associate, conducted by Julie Mills, Head of Workplace Learning.

Hello, and welcome to the Singapore edition of our March 2018 Ashurst Employment World@Work podcast series. I'm Julie Mills. I head up our Workplace Learning practice here and I'm an Expertise Counsel in our Sydney Employment practice.

Now, in this episode, we're looking at employer review websites. So, we're talking about those sites that allow employees to comment and rate their employers on an anonymous basis. Now, this is a particularly contentious topic at the moment and it raises a number of practical and legal issues, like:

• How accurate is the information on these sites anyway?
• Can employers take steps to control the content?
• And, if you can, the next question is, should you?

So, what are the pros and cons of the content of these sites for employers, not just for employees?

Now, to help us consider some of these issues, I'm joined by Karen Mitra, a Senior Associate in our Employment group in Singapore.

So, Karen, before we really get into the details, let's just start with the basics. What are these on line company review sites and what regions do they cover?

Thanks, Julie, well, in this day and age we have sites that review anything and everything. Before you go to a restaurant you look them up on HungryGoWhere, Trip Advisor, Dimmi —you're checking out the food, the service, the price. Same thing before you book a hotel – you can see what other people have had to say about how clean the rooms are, what the service is like and other types of information on sites like hotels.com and booking.com. And similarly, before you apply for or start working for a new job, you can see what other former and current employees have had to say about that employer and that information is available on a variety of websites. The most popular one of these is Glassdoor.

Effectively, these sites are just forums in which current and former employees are able to anonymously share information about working for the company, the salary and they also enable the employees to rate the company on a scale of 1 to 5. Normally, you can't say things specifically about individuals who work there except with respect to the CEO and some of the most high profile individuals there.

Glassdoor is not the only one but it is probably the most well-known and the most common, but employees from Australia can use sites like JobAdviser.com (and) Seek.com.au. There is a specific site in Canada called RateMyEmployer and I know there's one in Germany called Kununu. So, those are just a couple but they're available pretty much everywhere.

I think Glassdoor is pretty much global as well, isn't it Karen?

That's right. I've seen reviews on the site for employers across the Asia Pacific region. So, it's probably the one that is most relevant to employers.

Okay, so in terms of regional coverage, we're looking at quite a lot of coverage across the globe now for these types of sites. And it's interesting, a number of people that I have spoken to about them — and these are employers — tend to have pretty strong and negative reactions. So, Karen, in your experience, how accurate is this most common reaction that 'no one ever says anything good in an anonymous review'?

It's a really interesting point and, to be honest, when I first heard about these reviews and websites, I kind of had the same view, 'who goes onto one of these websites and goes to all the effort of posting a review unless they've got something bad to say'?

It's probably true in some sense that people are more likely to post a review if they've got a negative opinion than a positive opinion. So, generally speaking, you might see more negative reviews than positive reviews on the sites. But, having said that, I don't think it's true as a completely accurate statement. If you go on Glassdoor and you have a look at the reviews on there, it just shows that actually that stereotype is not true. Facebook is a really good example of that on Glassdoor. It has a rating of 4.6 stars and is rated as the best place to work for 2018 and I think it has actually had that rating on Glassdoor for probably the past 5 to 7 years.

But, more importantly, if you actually look at Glassdoor's figures themselves, they say that 70% of the employees on the site say they are okay or satisfied with their job in the company and the average rating is actually 3.4.

So, I think what you can take away from that is that you're going to have reviews that range from absolute praise to absolute slander because people have different ideas and motivations for going on the site, but that doesn't mean that the site should be written off as completely irrelevant for employers.

And, I guess, if we look at the worst case scenario, Karen, because that's what we tend to do as lawyers, given the potential for slander as you said, I think was absolute slander …

Yes.

… do you think that employers should make some efforts to try and control the content on the sites?

I think something that people look at particularly from the employer: you look at your company, you work really hard for them, you've got a really good view of the culture and the company and you see this review on Glassdoor and you think, 'wow, that is completely slanderous, that is not what my company is like at all' and you can feel quite indignant and want to do something about it. In practice, I think, it's probably quite futile to attempt to manipulate or remove the reviews or try and do something about it. There's a couple of main reasons for that.

The first is that websites try and stop employers from manipulating or removing reviews. Like they say, your company information is not a Wikipedia page, you can't just edit it whenever you'd like. The only thing that really employers can do when it comes to reviews, is to respond to them – make a comment in response – explain the real situation, (and) update your company information to talk about the amazing benefits you offer. If people say, for example, that the office is terrible and there's nothing fun and exciting to do, you could post photos that demonstrate what working there is really like. So, that's probably the main thing you can do to counter it.

The other thing about this is that these types of websites are really keen to ensure that employers can't identify who wrote the review. The reviews and salary reports are all completely anonymous and, in any event, even if you were actually, as an employer, to find out who wrote the review, if it was a former employee and, more particularly, if it was a current employee, there would be a whole range of risks of actually trying to do anything about it in terms of going after the employee and particularly, trying to take disciplinary action against people who have written reviews. So, that's another thing to bear in mind.

The other thing is that these sites are, like everything else on the internet, bound by defamation laws which are particularly strong in places like Australia and Singapore. That's the reason that for a lot of these sites, you are not going to see the names of individuals, you're not going to see the names of particular managers (and) you're really only likely to see the names of CEOs or really high ranking individuals.

And then finally, just to ease your fears a little bit, these reviews are subject to community guidelines. So, like all the other big platforms, there's a list of rules and regulations that apply to the sites that they ask people to bear in mind when they are posting reviews. So, one of the things that people are often quite concerned about is confidential information. What if these employees can go on here and give out all this information about our biggest target market, our sales records for the last month and other things like that that are quite confidential. If a review breaches the community guidelines, it will be removed. So if you do see something on a website like Glassdoor that you think contains confidential information, you can always contact the site, explain the situation and see if they'll take it down. If it really is confidential, generally the website will be pretty good about taking it down.

It sounds like there's a range of checks and balances that are already in place to monitor and control what's on these sites. Now, obviously employers are not going to be happy with anything up there in some cases, but given that there's not much they can do, do you suggest then that maybe they just ignore them, get on with their day and leave it to the defamation laws and the community guidelines to sort out?

Probably not. I think there's a whole range of reasons that employers should be looking at these websites and the main one is really that any information you can get about your company and what employees and the community think about your company, is a good thing. So, you can use the data on these sites to identify problems that you're not identifying through other means. So, if something is not coming up through the internal complaint mechanism, you may not realise that it's an issue but you might see it, for example, on one of these websites.

So you can have a look at these websites and weigh up the validity and reliability of the information – 'are these messages that we're seeing across jurisdictions with respect to employees who are posting on the website … does this information kind of match with stuff we are seeing on our employee engagement surveys?'. Sites like these provide everyone with a bunch of additional information and information on the company's culture. So, it's really important to monitor it from that perspective. From a public image perspective, you can also look at the content on the sites to see what other people make of the brand and that allows you to get a sense of what people think, whether or not you have a positive brand, a negative brand. Roughly, it attracts 30 million new and unique visitors a month. So, that’s quite a lot of people who are coming to your website and either reading the reviews or commenting on the reviews and so it's quite a useful source of information to see what, if anything, has come up from current and former employees and what you can do about that.

And then, the final thing is that you can use the site as a legal compliance barometer which is really important these days in the kind of "Me Too" / "Times Up" generation. You can have a look and see 'have people made allegations about sexual harassment on the website; are they suggesting there's a culture of discrimination?'. So, you can not only respond to those reviews but use the reviews if you think there's a problem to review your internal workplace behaviours policies, your investigation procedures, etc.

So, it's really just a good idea to keep an eye on the sites, just to see what's popping up as an additional source of information.

The only other thing to mention is just whether or not your particular policy deals with social media sites – and whether or not it actually covers platforms such as Glassdoor – and see whether or not usage of this platform interacts with your Whistleblowing procedure, or if there's something else in the policy that you need to deal with.

So, I guess what I'm hearing from you, Karen, is that it's another source of data. It's data that you may need to tread carefully around because there may be accuracy issues, but it's data that you may also be able to weigh against patterns that are happening internally, even if there's no explanation. So, for example, if you've got people leaving and they're not giving reasons why and then you suddenly start getting a spate of reviews along a certain angle, that may give you a heads up that 'okay, we've got a problem, someone didn't feel comfortable raising it internally, we need to look at our complaint mechanism procedure, we need to look at our training, we need to look at how we enforce all of these different procedures so that people feel comfortable to raise them'.

Yes, absolutely. It's not supposed to be a replacement of other data, it just compliments the data that you're already getting from other mechanisms. So you can use it as a barometer, you know, 'is this something that's consistent with other information that we're seeing or does it tell us that everything we are doing internally to gather information is completely wrong?'.

And Karen, what about using it as, I guess, a form of comparative data? Could these sites potentially help employers glean information about what else is happening out in the market?

Yes, absolutely. So when it comes to things like salary information, you don't want to replace the use of these types of websites with paying for remuneration surveys from recruiters and things like that, but it is really useful to see what other people in the market are doing. Do you have a higher or lower rate of satisfaction than other companies? Are there other really good ideas that companies are implementing with respect to employee benefits or practices that you can adapt to your own company?

So, it's those types of things where using it as a comparative tool is quite helpful and the websites are free.

And I know our London office used one of these sites. They were doing an article on, I think they were doing it on benefits, specific benefits and attraction and retention mechanisms, and found one of these sites that discussed a 'Bacon Thursdays' benefit which, I think, is a fabulous opportunity if you love bacon. But, really interesting ideas that you may not have heard of through another source, I suppose.

Yeah, absolutely, and people are always having creative ideas and particularly when you can go on these websites and look at other ideas that people have implemented successfully – that's a really good source of information for your company. 'Bacon Thursdays' sounds pretty good to me.

I think so. So, Karen, if we had to pull this all together for our listeners, what are some key takeaways that you think they should keep in mind?

I think the first one is that these sites are here to stay. The internet is more and more of a popular way to look at things. People these days are more likely to Google something than they are to ask their next door neighbour about it. So, it's really important that you keep on top of things as an employer. They are a really good source of additional information and it's something to keep an eye on.

In terms of legal issues, I don't want to focus on that too much, but you do need to think about what you're going to do if there's defamatory comments that are made on the site. What are you going to do if there is confidential information that's posted? And how do you deal with these sites in the context of the interaction between the use of social media and whistleblowing? But, really the main thing is, just to think about this from a commercial perspective and how you can use these websites to your advantage. How you can use the information that's on them to identify issues or concerns within your company that you need to address? And how can you use them to publicise positive things about your company, and then, how can you use them, obviously, to make your company better in terms of seeing what other people in the market are doing?

Great, thanks Karen. So, it's an opportunity to see these sites as another information source to help you validate what's going on internally or potentially fill gaps that are going on internally. So, Karen, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your thoughts on what is really a very interesting development.