Reputation incident preparation for small business

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  Make a plan

  Identify your risks and plan what you will do

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  Write policies and procedures

  Develop customer complaint, workplace and staff policies to avoid potential incidents

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  Develop social media policies

  Develop social media and media guidelines to handle an incident

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  Train staff

  Ensure staff know and understand policies and guidelines

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  Respond to incidents

  Check facts, prepare messages, identify a key spokesperson, contact key stakeholders and your industry association, and monitor social media

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  Communicate

  Be quick to correct false or misleading information

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  Wellbeing and safety

  Support impacted staff and connect them with support services

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  Connect

  Connect with customers to reassure them of steps taken to prevent the incident reoccurring

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  Promote your business

  Develop marketing strategies to promote positive news or deals

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  Recovery planning

  Record lessons learned and update policies, plans and staff training

Complete a business continuity plan to prepare, respond and recover from potential reputation risks.

Steps to include in your plan:

• identify the key events and risks that are most likely to occur and would have the most negative impact on your business, including
  • highly negative media or social media coverage
  • rumour-driven crisis (spread of unfounded rumour)
  • inappropriate workplace behaviour (e.g. bullying, harassment)
  • organisational misdeeds and legal action (e.g. fraud, theft)
• use Hootsuite's Social media crisis communication: A complete guide [2023] to create your plan
• plan and record how you will respond to key risks and incidents – put policies and procedures in place
• conduct regular training with staff and update your plan.

Prepare a marketing plan using this information to help you know what to say and when.

Include in your plan:

• who is responsible for speaking to the media and managing social media
• social media and media guidelines
• key messages to handle potential damaging incidents.

Use this sample social media guidelines template and adapt to your business's needs.

Develop media guidelines by using these tips:

• appoint a media spokesperson for your business
• outline how to respond to media phone calls and messages
  • get the journalist's name, organisation, contact details and deadline
  • ask what questions they have
  • let them know the appropriate person will respond shortly
• provide comments to the journalist only if it directly relates to your area of expertise and you have approval
• before responding to the media
  • review or draft key messages
  • plan and practice your response
• during an interview
  • don't feel you have to answer every question, just stick to what you want to say
  • avoid saying 'no comment', instead say 'I can't confirm right now', or 'I don't have those details', and 'what I can tell you is'.

Develop processes for customer complaints and managing online comments and reviews. These can include:

• responding to genuine concerns and negative reviews
• listening and responding to customer feedback professional and politely
• responding privately to resolve issues raised online, but later posting how you have resolved it
• removing offensive online posts
• correcting or removing any misleading or false online content as soon as possible.

Policies and procedures

To avoid inappropriate behaviour ensure you have appropriate workplace health and safety and staff policies in place, including:

• ensuring all staff have required qualification and appropriate training and supervision for their role
• developing a checklist of key policies or staff induction processes for new staff members, for example
  • employee behaviour policy or staff code of conduct
  • workplace health and safety policy and procedures including
    • safe work
    • bullying and harassment
    • anti-discrimination and equal opportunity
    • fatigue
    • violence
  • customer service policies.

Additional resources

• Read the cash in transit code of practice 2011 (PDF, 763KB) and the guide for handling and transporting cash from Safe Work Australia.
• Find out about preventing and responding to occupational violence.
• Read the mental health and wellbeing resources for businesses.

Review IT threat preparation to learn how to protect your business from cyber attacks or data hacking incidents and how to implement online staff guidelines to avoid business data or customer privacy breaches.

First decide if responding to the issue will help or make the situation worse.

Social media response:

• review your social media guidelines (if you have them)
• for highly contentious issues, provide a social media response as soon as possible before it goes viral
• when responding, remain professional, respectful and polite.

Media response:

• review your media guidelines (if you have them)
• prepare your media response
• ensure the tone of your message is not defensive
• emphasise the wellbeing and safety of your staff, customers and the community come first
• explain relevant circumstances that may have lead to the incident, polices in place to address it and steps taken to resolve it and prevent it from happening again
• put the incident into context – if appropriate, highlight how long your business has successfully operated without having a similar issue or has managed similar issues
• provide written responses to journalists.

Social media rumours:

• always be quick to correct or remove false or misleading information posted on your social media site(s)
• consider if responding to certain social media posts will help or escalate the issue
• when responding, always remain professional, respectful and polite.

Media rumours:

• before responding to false media reports, consider if your comments will help or whether it will result in additional negative media attention
• when responding, clearly state how information or claims being made are incorrect, provide evidence where possible and ask the media outlet to remove the information or provide a retraction on the same or next day.

If the rumour has received wide coverage, send out communications to the media, staff, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.

• Investigate all complaints of inappropriate workplace behaviour – using an external investigator can prevent claims of bias.
• Suspend the person responsible if there's a serious breach of your behaviour policy or code of conduct.
• Notify the police if required.
• Seek advice if needed from
  • Workplace Advice Service offers free legal assistance on dismissals, workplace bullying and general protections
  • Beyond Blue offers advice on mental health in the workplace.
• Identify how policies were breached and update procedures to stop it happening again.
• Let staff know how you're handling the incident and advise them of any new or updated policies.

Check staff involved are okay and provide them with information and details for support services.

• Develop a marketing and promotion plan to promote positive information about your business.
• Evaluate how you handled the incident.
• Record lessons learned and update your business policies and business continuity plan.
• Advise or train staff on appropriate behaviour and workplace culture and policies.

We're sorry to hear about your experience with (include details). We take pride in our (services/products) and take feedback from customers seriously. Please message us directly so we can help you resolve this issue.

• Rumours that our business is experiencing financial difficulties (or other rumours) are completely unfounded and incorrect.
• We are open for business as usual.
• If customers or clients have any concerns, please feel free to contact us directly.

• We take this matter very seriously and have a zero-tolerance policy towards workplace (bullying/harassment).
• The person involved has been suspended (or placed on leave) pending the outcome of the investigation.
• We are cooperating with authorities and have launched an independent investigation into the matter.
• Due to privacy considerations we cannot discuss the investigation publicly at this stage.
• As an initial step, we have put in place additional procedures for all staff members to (provide appropriate information) so this doesn't happen again.
• We will also review our policies and procedures to introduce mandatory ethics and workplace culture training as part of our staff inductions.

• We understand this is a distressing situation and an independent investigator is looking into the incident.
• We send our deepest sympathy to the family and friends of (in case of an accident or death).
• The wellbeing of our staff, customers and the community always comes first.
• As this matter is before the court, we can't comment on the specific details of the incident, but will provide more information when we can.
• Thank you for your understanding at this stressful time.