by Zoe Zorka
Negative PR can be catastrophic for businesses. As well as having a detrimental impact on your brand, a business scandal could diminish your customer base and leave you with significant cash flow problems. In many cases, a high-profile scandal has been enough to cause the collapse of major corporations, so it is vital they are avoided at all costs.
Despite the consequences associated with business scandals, few companies take proactive action to prevent them. Instead, they seek to minimize the fallout when a scandal goes public. If you want to protect your business, take a look at how you can avoid the drama and consequences associated with a business scandal…
1. Encourage inhouse transparency
Business owners and upper managers may be unaware of poor business practices until they become nationwide news. Unfortunately, this means they are unable to step in and put a stop to unethical or immoral behavior until the damage is done.
Encouraging your staff to report their concerns and protecting whistleblowers is extremely important in a corporate environment. When employees are able to report activity confidentially or anonymously, you can make strategic decisions regarding how you will deal with the issue.
2. Increase security
Business scandals are often caused because unauthorized personnel gain access to confidential business information. Although they may have accessed this information illegally, this doesn’t negate the bad publicity your company will attract.
To prevent this from happening, it is vital that you have effective security in place. As well as enhancing the physical security at all of your business premises, you will want to ensure you have effective network support and cybersecurity policies in place too. Of course, your security policies should be continually updated and modified to reflect the changing nature of technological threats.
By using expert security advisers to implement effective security policies, you can ensure that your company’s sensitive data remains confidential.
3. Restrict information sharing
Instead of allowing all employees to access the same material, restrict information sharing according to a need to know policy. It is relatively easy to implement internal access controls but not all businesses bother to do so. Unfortunately, this means that almost any member of staff can access information which they have no reason to view or use.
As well as protecting your company from external threats, it is important to remember that threats can come from inhouse too. When employees do uncover something which could cause a business scandal, they should be incentivized to report it to upper management, as opposed to leaking it to the press or other external agencies.
Protecting Your Business
If you want to prevent a business scandal and the ensuing fallout, you will need to be proactive about your protecting your processes, data, and information. Even untrue allegations can cause extensive damage to your business, so don’t rely on impeccable business practices when preventing scandals. Instead, implement effective controls, security and practices so that your company’s confidential information remains safe and secure at all times and your business is able to thrive.