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The US-based IT firm Cloudflare is facing criticism for how senior staff handled the dismissal of an employee.

What happened?

Brittany Pietsch worked at the IT firm from August 2023 until January 2024 when she was dismissed over a video call that was attended by a member of HR and a director whom she’d never met. Her immediate supervisor wasn’t on the call.

She recorded herself on the call and uploaded the video to her TikTok account.

On the call, she was reportedly told that she’d not met expectations for performance but wasn’t given specifics. When she queried why her manager wasn’t present, her question was allegedly dismissed and she was told that the call wasn’t the right situation to provide the detail she’d requested.

In response to the video, the firm’s CEO Matthew Prince posted on X: “In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them.”

There are plenty of general practice points to note here. Some of them are rooted in employment law and others are rooted in common sense, but I want to look at the PR fallout that could affect companies whose employment practices fall short.

Putting customers and staff off your brand

A recent YouGov survey showed that nearly half of Brits wouldn’t buy from a brand if it treated its staff badly, and more than one-quarter would think less of the brand but would still buy the products.

If an employer has a bad reputation among its customer base, or if the reputation is made public through word of mouth or sharing poor practices over sites and forums such as Glassdoor, TikTok, and Google Reviews, it’ll likely impact the company’s recruitment too. It’s unlikely that people will want to work for a company that mistreats its employees.

Generation Z workers appear to be much more switched on when considering job roles that reflect their ethics and values and allow them to make a positive impact. According to a report from TheHRDirector.com, 22% of 18 to 34-year-olds listed corporate values, above salary, as their leading concern when choosing a new role, and half said they research a company’s corporate values before applying.

Things stay on the internet

It used to be that poor employment practices were made public only if they made it to tribunals. But social media has made it much easier for aggrieved employees to make their grievances known.

For example:

• a worker at HMV live-tweeted dismissals;
• Nicola Thorp set up an online petition against sexist dress codes that required female staff to wear heels, which led to a change in PwC’s dress code;
• on TikTok, posts with the hashtags including #worktok for general work-related posts, as well as #quitmyjob and #iquitmyjob have racked up hundreds of millions of views; and
• on Reddit, the discussion r/antiwork has a community of more than 1.6 million employees sharing experiences of poor treatment.

All it takes is one employee with a genuine complaint to encourage others who’ve had similar experiences to speak out, which can spiral into a full-blown PR crisis. And the worst part? Bad publicity on the internet never fully disappears!

Are non-disclosure agreements still worth it?

Following misuse in several cases, with some of the most high-profile cases including the Yorkshire Cricket Club institutional racism case and the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse case, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are being treated with much more suspicion.

The idea behind an NDA in instances such as this is that the affected party keeps quiet about malpractices and may receive a payout for their silence.

However, the affected parties also have the choice to breach those agreements, even though it may mean forfeiting the money they were paid for their silence. In the Weinstein case, many of the women who spoke up decided that the risk of speaking up was worth taking. The public outcry was enormous and the scandal did so much damage that the Weinstein Company went insolvent in 2018 and Harvey Weinstein was arrested, charged with r*pe, and sentenced to prison in New York and California.

Customers are more switched on to ‘washing’

Pre-social media, good PR and marketing may have been enough to salvage a company from the reputation damage caused by poor employment practices. But with more and more companies having a social media presence, and customers following said companies on social media or using relevant tags, those customers are totally fine with holding businesses to account when the marketing doesn’t match up with the reality.

There’s a growing backlash against businesses that customers believe are ‘washing’ themselves when they celebrate events such as Pride, Black History Month, International Women’s Day, Neurodiversity Celebration Week and much more. This means that these companies may do things like change their logos to match the event or publish posts on social media saying, “we support our LGBTQI+/female/Black/neurodivergent staff and customers at this time”, while their policies and practices do nothing to tackle racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia or any other kind of prejudice.

So, instances where a company is called out online aren’t uncommon (eg, the Cloudflare TikTok). However, the company focusing solely on its reputation post event won’t help in the short term and the company may find itself fielding more and more crises from more employees, current and former. So, when there’s a dispute that arises, it’s important to consider how to act legally and follow the correct process to prevent further reputational damage.

And, if in doubt, always instruct a lawyer! It might be costly, but the cost of not getting legal advice in situations like this could be even higher.