Workplace reputation is a critical, yet overlooked, strategic advantage for companies

Unlike Joan Jett, employers should give a damn ‘bout their reputation.

Corporate reputation was long dismissed as a soft metric, only to be considered in crises. But that perception is changing. Recent research finds that company reputation, including workplace reputation, can boost financial performance.

A recent analysis by PR and communications firm Burson of more than 60 publicly traded companies between October 2024 and October 2025 found that an organization’s reputation created, on average, an extra 4.78% in annual shareholder return value. The firm estimated that reputation drives an extra $7 trillion in value for publicly traded companies globally.

According to Corey duBrowa, Burson’s global CEO and a former communications executive at companies including Google, Salesforce, and Starbucks, the research proves reputation isn’t something companies can afford to just focus on when in trouble.

“I worked for CEOs for 15 years who spent an extraordinary amount of time and resource firefighting crises. That was the way they thought about reputation. But to me, the long-term key to reputation is the work that you do when really nobody’s paying attention, and they’re certainly not thinking of it as a crisis,” duBrowa told HR Brew.

The report assessed eight factors driving reputation, including citizenship, creativity, and governance. The factor ranked lowest in perceived importance by surveyed executives was workplace reputation. The report noted, however, that this can offer employers a strategic advantage: an 11.8% performance gap exists between companies with the best and worst workplace reputations.

“It’s easy for companies to fall into a trap of focusing only on the most obvious reputation levers,” duBrowa said, like a tech company focusing on innovation or a pharmaceutical company focusing on governance. Employees, he continued, are “the most authentic, incredible channel for a company’s story. A positive message from a really satisfied employee will always carry really profound weight.”

Bad reputation. Many companies haven’t paid as much attention to their employer reputation recently, in part due to a broader pullback on hiring. As the labor market has become more saturated with job seekers, external image has become less critical to employers, experts told HR Brew.

Some companies have also enacted changes that have negatively affected workplace culture, such as layoffs and strict return-to-office or AI adoption mandates—while emphasizing a focus on performance. While this approach may have short-term benefits, it could also create future headaches.

“They’ve almost flipped back to the way it was pre-Covid, assuming that’s going to deliver the strategy. And in some organizations it absolutely will, but in a lot of organizations, I’d probably argue the majority won’t,” said Victoria Lewis-Stephens, founder and global managing director of United Culture, a UK-based consulting firm focused on company culture, employee engagement, and behavioral change.

While reputation may not be top-of-mind for employers, it is for job seekers: 87% of US employees said that reputation influenced their decision to accept their current role, according to an October survey of 1,500 workers by United Culture. But only half of those respondents said their company’s stated values were actually reflected within the workplace.

“People don’t feel like they’re being met halfway, or they feel like what they’re getting is not as strong as it could be or should be in the current environment. And I think that’s where you erode trust, and therefore you erode reputation,” Lewis-Stephens noted. “So as soon as the job market picks up and it’s still buoyant in some areas, people will be off, and you’ll see movement.”

That will be critical as employers increasingly adopt AI, according to duBrowa. Those that train their workforce to use AI will come out ahead of those that simply adopt the tools.

“You’re not viewing AI strictly in terms of efficiency gains or even jobs that you’re able to reconfigure or cut, but you’re really thinking about how do we train our workforce so that AI becomes a strategic lever for them to do their jobs better, both within the company internally and also how they apply that to the problems they’re trying to to solve externally,” duBrowa said.

The companies that do, he added, will be more innovative, have more satisfied customers, and be considered employers of choice.

Fix your reputation. Employers seeking to improve their reputation should walk the walk.

“What organizations should really focus on is not just reputation and the communication of it, but rather the HR practices and the execution on those that lead to reputation,” said Jerel Slaughter, a professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.

For example, employers could apply to be Great Place to Work certified, though the process is based on employee engagement surveys, which often gauge worker sentiment on issues like trust in leadership, work-life balance, and growth opportunities.

“If organizations are executing on those HR practices that lead them to be a best place to work, then that makes it more likely that they’re going to appear on those lists,” said Slaughter. “And then you’ll have those positive outcomes that contribute to the bottom line.”

No matter what practices employers adopt, they should view managing their reputation as a continuous practice. Businesses that only care about reputation during crises won’t have a workforce to support them when things go wrong, Lewis-Stephens said.

“I think it’s something that just needs to be nurtured on an ongoing basis,” she said. “If it’s not, things fall apart quite quickly.”