With the focus on social media, we all spend a great deal of time focused on how external stakeholders can take control of a company’s message, and impact their reputation.

Today, National Public Radio ran the first of a three part story (here) that has the potential to become a reputation issue for several airlines, as well as the FAA. The report is about issues arising from several airlines’ decisions send their airplane repairs abroad in order to cut costs. The key to the most compelling issues raised in the story? The involvement of a primary but often overlooked stakeholder group: employees.

A company’s reputation amongst its own employees is an area of reputation to which firms should pay explicit attention. A sense of shared community is inherent, but the effort to hide issues from this stakeholder group is the most difficult, while the opportunity for direct and immediate communication is strongest. In a reputation crisis, a positive perspective on the firm from an average employee will have stronger impact than a press briefing from a manager, while an otherwise strong external reputation can be eroded quickly by employees who hold the company’s practices in low esteem.

Back to today’s example: In the broadcast version of the story, the reporter indicates that he went to El Salvador to look into one of the companies performing the outsourced airline maintenance. He explains that he sought to speak with management of the firms, but they would not speak with him.

A business refusing to address press is usually not a smart option. In this case, it led the reporter to forget about management’s perspective and instead to track down some employees and ask them about the U.S. airlines they are working with. They were more than happy to oblige, and the result was not great for the firm. In today’s story they discussed having put a crucial part of a door in backwards so that it broke during flight, and tomorrow we are promised that mechanics at the firm will tell us about “troubling practices on the shop floor”.

It is not clear why the maintenance company’s executives would not talk to the reporter, after all, they are simply performing a legal business under FAA regulations, aren’t they? Well, whether or not they are covering up some bad behavior, their mistake was to assume that they could control the message about their company, and their mistake should be a lesson to all companies.

As a very smart client of ours likes to say, the key to a good reputation is to “behave well, and communicate what matters”. If you are a company that is not behaving well in the eyes of some stakeholder group, then your communications will ring false. If you are behaving well, and you communicate what matters to your stakeholders, you will have happy stakeholders, and no cause for concern.

Companies may erect policies to try and control the communications from their employee stakeholder group, but for most companies, this is neither iron clad, nor sustainable, especially if this group has something to say about the company’s behavior. Reputation management involving external stakeholders like customers, regulators and advocates cannot resort to rules and policies around what can and can’t be said, and no company should assume that reputation management for internal stakeholders be any exception. In this case, the airline maintenance company needs to jump on the clueplane, ASAP.