Some days I am truly surprised at how people behave. I saw a YouTube video posted by a Domino’s Pizza employee. The persons in question created a film of themselves defaming a pizza and claiming they intended to serve the tainted product to a customer. The thoughtlessness of these two people has forced a brand name organization to react to regain the trust and confidence of its customers. 

Patrick Doyle, Domino’s North America President, issued an affirming statement that the incident was isolated and contained and that the miscreant employees have been terminated. It is unclear what the economic impact of this smear on the Domino’s brand will be. I believe that they have responded appropriately and will emerge as a stronger organization as the dust settles.

My question is this: What should companies be doing now to protect their brand in the future?

Not ironically, I have a few thoughts on the matter. Companies can involve their workforce in the protection of the corporate brand. This simply means asking employees on a routine basis if they are seeing any inappropriate or compromising behavior in the workplace. Many companies offer “ethics hotlines”, but these are largely ineffective. They are ineffective because many employees are ambivalent about the affiliation choices they make in the workplace. When people are undecided about where they want to be or what they want to do, they will generally not go through the extra effort to pick up a phone and call someone, particularly someone they don’t know. People occasionally expect that someone else will do it for them. “Everyone saw it, I am sure that this will be taken care of by my manager” may be something the ambivalent team member would say to themselves after witnessing monkey business. You may be asking yourselves these questions: Are people really that ambivalent? That detached?

Consider this, have you ever passed a person in a stalled car on the road and told yourself “they have a cell phone; someone must be on the way to help them”, and drove on. Workplaces are not different. People will hope that the “right thing” gets done, but may not do anything to bring the “right thing” about.

I have some simple recommendations for companies that want to proactively protect their brand reputation:

1. Consistently communicate to all employees the company's intention to maintain a legal, ethical, responsible, customer focused workplace

2. Periodically ask employees if they have knowledge of any monkey business (use an outside, objective, third-party)

3. Make it easy for people to answer the question. The company should call them and ask them for the information. That signals that it is important, and significantly increases the likelihood that relevant information is collected.

4. Respond to the information employees provide with actions for improvement and communicate the actions and results back to them.

I am not sure that Domino’s could have prevented the behavior of the now infamous former employees, but I suspect this was an escalation of a series of bad behaviors in the workplace. I speculate that their co-workers may have had concerns about them and would have said something – if they were asked.

This will die down soon enough for Domino’s and its customers. There seems to be many more positive endoresments from loyal customers on the web than those swearing off pizza all together.

As for me, I am on my way to Domino’s to buy lunch for me and my team!