For most of the past two decades, reputation was viewed as a communications problem, something you shaped through messaging, managed through media, and protected through careful narrative control.
Today, that model is far harder to sustain with organisations no longer able to assume they control the story just because they control the message. Reputation now depends less on what organisations say about themselves and far more on whether people the lived experience matches the promise and increasingly, employees are the ones who determine that verdict.
Recent RepTrak research shows that 64% of stakeholders believe poor working conditions damage an organisation’s reputation, while 56% identify a lack of equal opportunity as a major negative driver. These are not secondary concerns, but fundamental determinants of whether an organisation deserves their trust.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Australia reinforces the same shift. Today, Australians are turning to the people closest to them, neighbours, colleagues, co-workers and their own CEO, while trust in national government leaders and major news organisations has continued to fall. People are increasingly relying on sources they see as closer, more immediate and more accountable.
That means employees are already contributing to your reputation, whether formally or informally. The conversation is already happening over coffee, on review sites, and in WhatsApp groups. The real question for leaders is whether it bears any resemblance to the story the organisation thinks it’s telling.
Influence has Moved Beyond Your Control
Traditional communications relied on a relatively simple assumption - if you could get your message in front of the right people, you could influence what they thought and felt.
Influence has now moved beyond the channels that organisations control and into networks they do not i.e. employee conversations, peer recommendations, review platforms, professional communities and the informal signals people pick up long before they engage with official communications.
This does not mean corporate messaging is irrelevant, it just carries less weight when it is not backed by evidence or experience. No budget can compensate for a gap between what an organisation claims and what its people experience every day.
Therefore, the strategic priority is not to manufacture reputation through messaging, it is to build the kind of organisation that earns the reputation it wants to have, ie from the inside out.
Positive Storytelling does not Outweigh Negative Experience
Negative experiences tend to carry more reputational weight than positive storytelling – something often miscalculated by organisations. A strong employer brand campaign for example may capture attention and initial interest, but it will not overcome persistent internal issues if employees are describing a very different reality. As a result, both retention and reputation suffer.
This matters particularly in the Australian context. Edelman’s research points to a 19-point trust gap between high and low-income Australians, one of the widest in the developed world. Among lower-income Australians, business is the only institution seen as both competent and ethical, which creates a significant opportunity, but also a higher bar.
For leaders, the implication is clear, trust cannot be managed as a communications asset alone, it must be earned through how people are paid, treated, included and given a voice.
These are just a few examples of actions we see of organisations taking proactive measures to ensure experience matches expectation:
- Ensure your employer brand is authentically represented both inward and outward facing;
- Define your culture and what makes it great, and intentionally develop ways in which to make it tangible for employees;
- Conduct employee surveys to understand their experience, but more importantly communicate results and actions as a result back to your workforce;
- Intentionally create opportunities to discuss your values and stress test them by working through scenarios;
- Be honest in your internal communications and don’t always tell the “good news” – people know that it can’t all be good, all the time;
- Celebrate the wins and the moments that make working at your organisation valuable to the employee.
At some point, every organisation faces a choice between repairing damaged trust after the fact or consistently delivering against the values that matter most to the people it serves. It is the reputational equivalent of debunking versus pre-bunking, and the organisations that invest in the latter rarely need to rely on the former. Get this right and your employees become your most credible advocates, strengthening reputation from the inside out. Get it wrong and the gap between what the organisation says about itself and what people actually experience becomes harder to close over time.
