There is now a lot more transparency around how a business conducts itself. The internet is largely responsible for this as it has given people the opportunity to air their likes and dislikes about a company very publicly.

TripAdvisor has turned the hospitality industry on its head while Yelp has local businesses clamoring for that five-star review.

A massive 76 percent of professionals will research a company online before considering a job opportunity (Bayt) and won’t apply if the average reviews is lower than three stars.

If it becomes known that a company is not great to work for, it will struggle to attract talent for job positions. Not only that, but it’s also worth remembering that customers prefer to do business with a company that has a good reputation and happy staff.

Good reviews, of course, have the opposite effect. Being known as a great company will enable an employer to select from the very best candidates. Having high-caliber staff will, in turn, attract more customers because they will know they’re dealing with the best.

If you are suffering from bad employee reviews, consider it a chance to change your business practices. Receiving negative feedback means that something may be wrong with the way the organization runs and it needs to be addressed for the business to succeed.

These case studies from Indeed show how learning from bad reviews can improve a business brand. Develop a proactive approach to customer and employee reviews.

Things you can do include:

  • Setting up alerts to notify when your company is mentioned on social media.
  • If you find a negative post, try to identify the employee and come to a resolution offline, and then ask them to remove it.
  • Don’t reply impulsively to negative reviews. An ill-considered or ill-timed public response can damage your brand further.
  • Analyze negative feedback. Identify trends which indicate issues within the business.
  • Send out regular employee satisfaction surveys – try to identify and resolve problems early on.

Whatever you do, don’t ignore negative reviews. You can guarantee that most of the people reading them won’t ignore them. Instead, learn from criticism and use it to transform your brand into something people trust 100 percent, whether they are potential customers or potential employees.