Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Tamara Littleton: Welcome back to What Just Happened, and we have an interesting blast from the past crisis to discuss today. But as a warning to our lovely listeners, you might not want to eat while you’re listening to this one. Kate, what’s on the menu today?

Kate Hartley: I mean, I never want to eat again. I don’t think so. I sort of can’t wait to get into this.

And on the other hand, it’s absolutely disgusting. So we’re going back to April 2009, and a really delightful story of two Domino’s pizza employees who decided to change up the ingredients of a pizza.

TL: Do you know what? It’s wild to think it was just 17 years ago, and it was everywhere on social media back in the day. But it’s still so relevant for crisis preparation because things like this still happen, and we’ll get into how this has evolved and why it’s relevant. But first, let’s talk about what happened.

KH: I don’t really want to now. Can we? Can we just?

Can we change this and not do it anymore? Okay. So on 13 April 2009, there were two people who worked at Domino’s in Conover in North Carolina, and they were called Christy Hammonds and Michael Seltzer, and they filmed themselves doing things to a pizza that should never ever be done to a pizza.

One media article, rather coyly, said they violated health codes, and that’s yeah, that’s definitely one description. So basically, they filmed themselves doing things like sneezing on pizzas. He was sticking cheese up his nose, farting on the salami, and then putting it on the pizza.

Anybody want a pizza now? And at one point, Michael Setzer rubs a sponge on his bum and then wipes a pan with it. And then they upload.

They filmed all this, obviously, and then they uploaded a series of five videos to YouTube, and they called it “Disgusting Domino’s people, and by the way, I think this is quite interesting. They were 31 and 32. They were not kids.

TL: I mean, it was so unbelievable and totally disgusting, and not surprisingly, it took off online. Big surprise there, and they got caught and fired, and later charged with criminal charges. But the fascinating thing is how long it affected Domino’s for. Because people really didn’t want to let this go.

KH: I think people were really concerned about it. And I, I mean, to be honest, I wouldn’t have gone rushing out to Domino’s. I don’t think after that.

So that video was uploaded, and almost immediately somebody blogged on it and included the videos in that blog, and then it just took off from there. So that video hit a million views in the first couple of days, and this is 2009, so that you know big numbers then. And then the VP of Communications at Domino’s, who was a guy called Tim McIntyre, he was alerted by a blogger who’d written about it, who who said to him, “Look, you will probably want to know about this.” Domino’s then tried to get the video taken down, but that was difficult because YouTube needed the approval of the person who’d posted it originally, i.e., Christy Hammonds, so then Domino’s had this problem because they they could see these two people doing these terrible things, but they didn’t know where they were.

So they had to identify the people and the store, and apparently it was a couple of university students who saw a Jack in the Box sign in one of the videos, and then they used Google satellite images to see where in the country there was a Domino’s near a Jack in the Box. At that point, they identified Hammonds, and she apologised on email. But obviously, it was all a bit late by then, wasn’t it?

So the trust for Domino’s went absolutely through the floor, and as you can imagine, and the New York Times said Google search results were completely dominated by those videos, and it had a really big impact on sales. So in that area around Conover, sales dropped by 50%.

TL: I mean, I’m kind of surprised anyone was still going there, and that drop wasn’t more than 50%.

KH: Well, quite. But the really sad thing about this, I think, is that 600 people across that region lost their jobs because of that drop in sales. Because the drop in the sales obviously is much wider than that particular store, and these are franchises, so these are small business owners, you know, who were effectively paying the price. They were losing their businesses as as a result, and it was actually awful.

TL: Yeah, and suddenly it’s that really isn’t funny. This has a serious impact on people’s lives. So, how did Domino’s respond?

KH: Quite slowly initially. I think they were worried that if they responded, they’d give it more airtime. So this was, you know, two people in one local place.

They just thought it would go away, but of course, you know, as ever, it didn’t. So a few days later, they issued an apology on their website and on what was then Twitter, and then a couple of days after that, they issued a video apology, and that was. By Domino’s USA President Patrick Doyle, and he made a really good, I think, really good apology video.

So, in that video, he talks about you know the fact they took immediate action because they obviously fired the two people involved, even though the employee said it was a hoax. He said, you know, we’ve sanitised every store, we’re auditing everything we do, we’re reviewing our hiring practices, and it’s a really personal video. He talks about the business owners who are reading from the damage and how they’re really working to regain customers’ trust.

So it’s a very, very good, good video, I think. And of course, it’s on the channel where all this broke.

TL: He did it on YouTube, which is very good practice, of course. And but it made news all over the world, and of course, those news outlets all posted snippets of the video, and people still know about it all these years later. But YouTube did eventually take the videos down, and one of the big lessons at the time was that nothing really stays local because of social media.

But Domino’s did recover, and it’s now obviously the world’s most successful pizza chain. But do we know what happened to the two people in the video?

KH: Yeah, so they were charged. It was pretty serious, actually. They were charged with food contamination charges, which is a felony in the U.S.

And even though they said the food never went out, but there was some doubt about that. There’d been a kind of mixed messaging, mixed stories about what they’d said to the police. So they initially were were cashed off to jail, and then they got suspended sentences.

But they did things like community service and fines, and they were barred from Domino’s, unsurprisingly, and from seeing each other. And I did when I was researching this, I did see one news headline that said that Hammonds said that she’d never been able to get another job in fast food. Not really surprised.

So yeah, they weren’t allowed to see each other either. And then Seltzer apparently said it was probably a bad idea to make a video of it, which is, I would say, an understatement. And you can imagine the media reaction.

I mean, they really went for them, and they were then trying to because the media were carrying on this story. They were trying to find out more about the individuals, and then of course it turned out Hammonds already had a criminal record, including for some sort of sexual assault charge as well, so it was not a good result for them either. But I think the kind of big question to me, I can ask this tomorrow.

This is probably one for you with your social media background. But why on earth would somebody do that when this is the you know this is the result of it? Why would they post these things on social media? Talk to me about that.

TL: Okay. Well, thank you for asking me that because I am going to get a bit geeky now. So, 2009: That that year is critical because that was the year that the Facebook like button was rolled out.

It was known by engineers as the awesome button, and it had a massive change because, of course, before up until then, and it’s it’s kind of weird to sort of think back about it. But social media was much more about sharing with your friends, and it was more like a sort of a list of your diary entries, essentially. But introducing that like button turned it into a much more of an algorithmic thing, and people would be rewarded by creating content.

It would go to the top of the feed, and of course, it was the early days of influencer culture and more engagement. So, sharing content that got more engagement led to more of a dopamine hit for the creator, which led to more and more outrageous content being created. So, it could have been. I mean, obviously, I don’t know what led them to do this, and it could be that they just thought they were doing it for a small amount of people, or it could be that this was an early example of clickbait, and they did it for the attention.

KH: See, that’s so interesting because I didn’t know about that, and obviously I went down a rabbit hole about this as well because it is just completely bonkers and fascinating. But that’s really interesting about the 2009 thing because I think that makes complete sense because there is something in psychology apparently called hyperbolic discounting, which is basically the human tendency to choose immediate small rewards over larger delayed rewards. So we act impulsively for the short-term rewards of things like views and laughs or likes, as it turns out, rather than the longer-term reward of you know things like keeping our jobs, those kind of things.

TL: Yeah, it’s the dopamine hit, and it’s still you know it’s it’s fundamental part of social media now. But yeah, which means that there’s more of this will still happen. But and there’s presumably also a culture thing at play here too, and we see this all the time when employees who are disgruntled or don’t feel they have power want to reclaim that power, particularly if they feel like a cog in a big corporate machine.

KH: I think that’s probably really true in this case because there is in one of those Domino’s videos, which sadly I had to find and rewatch for the purposes of this podcast, which was a really really unpleasant experience. But in one of them, there is a sort of implication that the manager wasn’t around and wasn’t and therefore wasn’t really working. It was working.

I think it was something about are we sitting next door as he always does, or you know there was some sort of implication that that person wasn’t working. Then we might explore that a little bit later on too. I think, but but anyway, and another rabbit hole for me, obviously, and this time on moral disengagement.

So we allow ourselves to disengage moral. From what we do when it suits us, because we don’t associate the prank with the victim, so we don’t think that putting snot on a pizza is going to make somebody sick. We just think we’re pranking the pizza prank.

By say when I say we, obviously I don’t mean we.

TL: Yeah, we have never done this. We have never done this. I mean we as human beings. And if someone else is laughing with us, we feel like we’re part of a group, we’re having fun. It’s all just it’s all just a joke, basically.

God, can you imagine if this had happened in COVID times? It would have been even worse. The thought of people people doing that, yeah,

KH: Awful.

TL: But you know what? As I mentioned, social media rewards all of this, so that short-term gain over long-term gain, vying for likes and shares, it all fits together, and it’s literally like a race to the bottom of how offensive you can be for the lols. So here’s a question, okay? Did people learn from this?

You know humans. Um, I remember a story about an employee at Burger King filming himself standing in two tubs of lettuce with the caption, “This is the lettuce you eat Burger King,” and he was caught by internet users using again location data to find the store. And people just never learn. So let’s look at why is this still relevant today?

KH: So for some reason, I find the idea of the image of somebody standing in two buckets of lettuce quite funny. I realise it’s not funny for Burger King or for the people who then have to eat the letters, but there is something weirdly amusing about the idea of somebody standing in a bucket of lettuce. I have no idea why, but the caption is not funny.

So just to say this is the lettuce you eat Burger King, I mean that’s a missed opportunity, isn’t it? It’s just not a funny caption. Anyway, that’s an aside.

Actually, I’m going to go down a quick another aside because I saw a post on Reddit from the Burger King guy, or at least somebody pretending to be the Burger King guy, wanting to tell his side of the story, which I thought was amazing. Anyway, so you said, have people ever learned, and why is it still relevant? Sorry, I went down a complete sidetrack there.

KH: Yes, it is still relevant, and no people haven’t learned. So, in 2021, a subway employee was filmed putting deli meats round a toilet seat, which is nice, nice, and then dropping food on the floor and putting that on TikTok. Apparently, he thought that was going to propel him into a music career. Not quite, not quite sure.

I think that’s quite a leap, personally, anyway. And then there’s a slightly more. I suppose it’s all serious, really, but a slightly more serious case in 2023.

There was in a Japanese sushi chain called Sushiro, where a 17-year-old student who was not an employee, but he was filmed licking an open soy sauce bottle and then also licking his fingers and touching all the sushi plates that were going past. And Sushiro initially said they were suing him for $480,000, but I think they later dropped the lawsuit. But that was part of a whole wave of what was being known at the time as sushi terrorism, which is a kind of weird thing in itself, isn’t it?

And that triggered $100 million market cap drop for that brand, and also then obviously a huge drop in customers. And then in 2025, just carrying on the disgusting things in food theme. And again, these two people were not employees, but two teenagers peed into a pot of broth in a restaurant in China.

Now, they were drunk. It may surprise you to know, and they didn’t work for the company, but they did film it and post it online, and they got caught and they got fined 227,000 pounds.

TL: I am quite pleased to hear that they did get fined. So, because there’s a there’s a lesson here: don’t pee in food, don’t sneeze on food, don’t film yourself doing it, and don’t upload it to social media because you will get caught.

KH: Good advice. Things to live by.

TL: And you know, I know we focused here on people filming themselves doing doing stuff, but there are lots of examples where people have deliberately sabotaged their organisation in other ways. So, including more serious food tampering. There was an example a few years ago of someone putting razor blades and needles into food products, and thankfully he was also arrested.

KH: Yeah, and I think you know for today, let’s stick with a more light-hearted bodily fluids in food. You know that fun subject. I do feel slightly sick because I’m definitely not having pizza tonight. But I think we should stick with that theme rather than the rather more serious sabotage issues.

TL: But you know there is so much to get into here around why an employee feels so detached from their organisation that they do this in the first place, and the culture of the place you work, and how to get that right so that people feel part of something bigger. Maybe looking at hiring policies, oversight at work, all sorts of things. And I can’t wait to talk to our guest about all of this after the break.

Break

TL: We’re joined today by Emma Ewing, founder of Big Fish Training. She has more than 30 years in PR, marketing, and corporate comms across in-house, government, and Asia. Roles and through Big Fish, she helps agencies and in-house teams build the skills to lead, pitch, and perform at their best.

And given this is a very people-focused crisis, we’re delighted she’s joining us. So, welcome, Emma.

Emma Ewing: Hey, thanks very much for having me on. It’s an incredible topic. Thank you.

TL: Well, and obviously, you’ve just heard us squirm through snot, sponges, and salami. What was your what was your gut reaction to the Domino’s story? As someone who trains people in communications and leadership, and where do you think the crisis really started?

EW: Oh well, I mean, I just heard Kate groan, and it’s exactly that. It was like, oh, I’m wincing hearing you talk about that. My first response, absolute disgust.

But actually, then as I listen to you talk about it, though, that second response comes in really quickly, which is like 600 people lost their jobs over something just two people did for a laugh. So it it stops being funny. It’s still disgusting, but it stops being funny really quickly. And then, actually, because of the nature of the job I do, it’s like, what was going on in that location that made two adults in their 30s?

KH: I couldn’t believe that. They weren’t teenagers.

EW: Yeah, it’s like they were in their 30s. What what was going on for them that made them think it was okay, and so maybe that’s the answer to the question. You know, where did the crisis really start?

Because of course the crisis went viral when it was uploaded to YouTube, and we could all see it. But the crisis must have started well before that. You know, it it was the culture of the store.

So you’re two people who were so disconnected from the brand, from the customers that they didn’t think about the effects of a real person having to eat those pizzas. And there’s also the question of where the manager was, which I’ve got loads to say about. But I think let’s come back to that.

And so I think, really thinking about it from a comms perspective, is people don’t stick cheese up their nose on camera out of nowhere. Something’s gone.

KH: Hopefully, even off camera. I mean, hopefully they just never do it. Well, exactly.

EW: I mean, I’m only thinking about the crisis side, and I’m yeah, I’m definitely not okay with people privately sticking cheese up their nose. You know, but something’s clearly got gone wrong, and who who’s going to be spotting that? Because people will have seen some signs, you know, but it won’t have been the comms team because of the nature.

So that that’s really a question I think for any any comms director listening is, you know, how much do you know what it’s really like to be working on the front lines of your organisation, and how much can you know? Because that’s where the early warning signs come in.

KH: That’s such an interesting because the comms was quite disconnected, I think, wasn’t it? And they because they waited for quite a long time to communicate. They were obviously hoping it was going to blow over.

Yeah, is it that disconnect that pushes those comms teams towards silence. Is it not knowing, like you know, what the hell? What the hell is this?

Is it because they just do hope it’s going to blow over? What do you think is the reason that people stay quiet? And how do you build a team that’s confident enough to to communicate when they really have to? As in this case, they did.

EW: Yeah, absolutely. That’s huge, isn’t it? And you know, to be fair to Domino’s, you know.

Thinking back to 2009, there had been viral video crises before, but this I think was one of the first where the own staff of an organisation made the video, and also their social media team was only a month old. So that’s part of it that maybe not feeling confident in in what they’re doing. So two days probably didn’t feel outrageous for 2009, but you’re absolutely right.

Teams are still doing it today, and I think it is that uncertainty that you mentioned, Kate. It’s like, will I get this right? And then more importantly, if I don’t get it right, what happens to me?

What happens to my team? Yeah, because it’s you know it’s going to be about will I get blamed? Have I been blamed in the past?

What you know when when things go wrong? Am I going to get thrown under the bus?

KH: And what if I make it worse? Because I guess that was that you know if you think oh my god am I going to make this worse? Yeah, it’d be terrifying actually.

EW: Yeah, I think so completely. And you know the way to build confidence it comes from leaders. So that comes from leaders in the comms team, and it comes from leaders outside of the comms team too.

So how that comms team is seen, and if people know that they’re going to get punished for acting and getting it wrong, then the safe option, and I’m putting little air quotes there, is to wait. And of course, actually, that often is totally the wrong move, as you both know, and also I think there is the other thing about leaders feeling equipped and prepared to deal with a crisis, so that they’ve they’ve got the muscle memory of of doing this, that they feel prepared, they trust their team, because a leader who panics or who wants to control everything, so every single word, every single action. They’re going to slow everything down. We need people who are like, I’ve got this, and I trust that we’ve got this.

TL: And let’s stay on that leadership theme, actually, because we talked earlier about employees feeling like a cog in the machine, yeah, and the manager apparently not being around. And Emma, you you train leaders to motivate their teams in in high pressure environments, but what actually makes people feel invested, and how much of that does actually come down to the manager?

EW: Wow. Okay. So there’s a lot there.

Taking the first part, it’s like what makes people feel invested. I think we all know that intrinsically. It’s that people feel seen.

You know, people feel that somebody knows their name at work, that their their manager notices when they do a good job, or if they’re having a bad day. You know, it’s just being it’s the human to human thing, isn’t it? It’s like somebody cares, and also there’s the fairness thing that’s huge.

That a manager treats everybody fairly, so we feel like we’re being treated fairly at work. It doesn’t matter who we are; other people aren’t getting favourite treatment, and then the other thing is really complicated because I think it’s got two sides to it. It’s knowing why your work matters.

So you know the end result of what you do in this case was pizza is someone’s dinner, right? So real people are going to eat that. And of course, if you lose sight of that, it’s really easy to treat it as a joke.

But the other complicated bit is everybody who’s listening here, who’s worked in a customer service-facing role, knows that customers aren’t always delightful. You know, sometimes those customers are really disrespectful and really horrible. And actually, it’s down then to the manager, I think, to have a culture that says, “All right, this has happened with a customer, but I’m going to help you deal with it.

And they’re going to empower their team to be assertive within the team to de-escalate and also to lick their wounds so that they’re not then wanting to retaliate. Because it feels like this prank. We don’t we don’t actually know.

It’s fascinating to me what was going on in their brains. You know, really, isn’t it? Was it retaliation?

Had they just had enough of being treated poorly, either by management or by by customers? And I think the anchor point here is it’s how a manager treats their team, because you know, wealth of research. Gallup did a massive piece of research.

The single biggest factor in an engaged team, people who want to be there and want to do the right thing, and a disengaged one is the manager, and that sticks even when the manager isn’t there. Because again, if you’ve got a manager that set a culture that continues, that’s valued when they’re not around, then people don’t need to be watched every single minute of the day. Because it was why wasn’t that manager there? I’m fascinated by that, but actually, did it matter that the manager wasn’t there because something was was rotten already?

KH: That’s so interesting. And at a local level, you can totally see if, as you said, if it was retaliation or. Well, I’m interested to know if you do we take that sort of back a stage.

Once something like this has happened, and somebody within your own culture, your own team, has done something like this, how do leaders in the rest of the business talk to the rest of the team? So to to make sure that isn’t happening anywhere else, or to kind of you know dissociate that from the rest of the business or the culture, how do they talk to the rest of the team? And and what do other people need to hear at that point.

EW: Absolutely, I love what you just said there. So that how do they disassociate, you know, the rest of the organisation from those two people? Because I think when Domino’s apologised, and you’ve talked about it, they did talk about the hard work of 125,000 other people, and that work was undermined by just two people.

And actually, it’s those 125,000 people that the leaders need to be thinking about. And Kate, I know from having seen you talk lots of times around this that empathy is huge in dealing with a crisis. And so, it’s actually having that empathy to think: How might employees be feeling now?

How might that if I win their shoes, what might I be feeling, and so in the domino situation, I thought they’d probably feel really embarrassed. You know, they’re having to explain that to someone. Goes, oh my god, you work there, and it’s awful.

Look at this, and I thought that they would be thinking really embarrassed. They might be really angry as well. Why did somebody do this?

This is putting my job at stake, and they may well be, as in this case, correctly worried about their jobs because 600 people did did lose theirs. So people need to hear it’s not them. You know, make it really clear.

And Domino’s did this, so that kudos to them. That leadership knows it was two people, not the whole lot, because if suddenly blanket new rules come in. It’s going to feel like when you were at primary school and somebody was talking.

Sorry, everybody, because that often was me. And then people, people got five minutes cut off their break time. You know, it’s like right, one person was talking, so none of you can go out to play.

And that’s what it can feel like if if people aren’t clear. Look, this is. These are two people we’re going to deal with this, and people know tell the truth, tell the truth, and make sure that everybody internally.

This is nothing new. Everyone listening, I hope, will know that. But it’s like everybody within the organisation needs to hear it from the organisation, a single source of truth before they hear it from their friends, their neighbours, they see it on social media, and then the final bit I think is sometimes missing is this empathy piece again that we have to let people know.

I think when we’re in a comms team, let people know that how they feel is reasonable. That it is appropriate to feel embarrassed and angry, and how does this affect me? So that we don’t just jump to because it’s so tempting, right?

Business as usual. How do we kind of push through this and pretend it never happened?

KH: I think that’s so important, and I want to look at the impact of that on the comms team themselves as well. Because we talk a lot about the communications to the rest of the team and how it makes them feel, but crisis days are absolutely brutal, aren’t they? I mean, they can really take it out of teams.

So how do you motivate your own comms team when they’re they’re also getting all this and they’re also feeling all these things because they’re employees, you know, they’re also feeling embarrassed and all those other things. But the brand’s getting absolutely battered; they’re having to deal with it. How do you look after your own team?

EW: Oh my goodness, exactly. Well, one I think is being conscious of that, and also being conscious of your own emotions too, because, like you say, everybody’s in the same boat. There, they’re feeling those emotions, and then it’s magnified because the crisis team are just reading all the comments online.

They’re having to deal with it. They’re having to go through that. What if if I say this?

If we do this, it’s awful. It’s exhausting.

KH: And they can’t retaliate either, can they? I mean, they can’t. Yeah, can’t make it worse.

EW: I know. I mean, we could go off on a little side quest, couldn’t we, and talk about all those times where people have just let it slip. But actually, that’s a really important point.

So it’s about pacing it because crises are not in the modern age. Crises rarely last one day. So we need to have a rota.

We need to set up handovers so that it’s not the same few people running on adrenaline for three days. But if it has to be a core team, it’s about resilience, and resilience requires rest, and that includes the leaders because if people don’t restock, even in small portions throughout the day, they’re just going to get more emotionally reactive, and that’s when they might retaliate, or they might say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, let’s just say this,” and they’re much less effective. And the sleep sleep research for this is really, really clear: that tired leaders, I mean, tired people, but they’ve done some research.

Tired leaders are shorter tempered and much more likely to make their teams disengage than people who’ve had sleep. So if the leader doesn’t rest, neither does everybody else. And then one other thing I thought might be useful to think about is once the crisis has gone away externally and all those headlines have gone away and everybody goes few, you know, over, and we go into that next phase.

We’re rebuilding. We’re reviewing. Actually, that’s when the adrenaline goes away, and often that sense of urgency goes away.

And that’s often you’ve probably both seen it. That’s when crisis teams feel the most battered because they can they can stop. And so actually, that’s when leaders need to be really careful to work with their teams and make sure that they give them the support and that you have the right kind of review and aftercare that doesn’t go into blame, but goes into what does everybody need right now and how can we learn?

KH: God, that’s so interesting. We could do. I’m I’m going to go down so many rabbit holes on the on the research around this. I absolutely love that, and I love the idea of mandating sleep as well to stop leaders becoming irritable. I think that’s such a great idea. Anyway, sorry.

TL: Yeah, but I also I think it’s so important that people are talking about it, and we saw that with the um the Heathrow crisis when that was the first thing that was discussed was that the team are against? You know that the leaders are going to rest. The team are going to rest.

That’s it. Should be a port and such an important part of the crisis planning. And and you know what we’ve talked about this so much is is related to culture, and I think I just like to sort of perhaps pick up on that. So, what does a culture where people feel safe to speak up actually look like, and can it work as an early warning system for comms teams?

EW: Yeah, so I think what we’re talking about here is a psychologically safe culture. So it’s psychologically safe; people are free to speak up. So I think a psychologically safe culture is quite a noisy culture.

You know, it can be messy. I think it can be messy. I don’t think it’s a very neat straight line.

So what that means is that little bits of bad news can travel up to the right places quickly. So people are able to raise small things early, not big things when it’s really too late. Because what that then means is people are able to raise.

Concern without becoming the problem themselves, and so if you’re in a safe culture, what happens is you can raise it, and you’re not treated as the problem. And actually, too often we’ve all seen where somebody has raised a concern, then they are treated as well. This is a big issue, and I wish you hadn’t brought this up.

And often they will suffer for that. So it’s about being able to tell your bosses what’s going on and what’s not working for you, but also able to challenge each other because surely in this case there were colleagues who were seeing little pieces of comments and behaviour escalating. You know this kind of stuff is often an open secret, you know.

We know that when anything awful comes out, it’s often started in a smaller way, and it’s an open secret. And the people close to it know what’s going on. So maybe the colleagues would have said, “Please stop putting cheese up your nose.” And and maybe you know, from a crisis, you know, don’t put it online, for goodness’ sake!

Think about what you’re doing. So you know, maybe the voice of reason from your coworkers is is what’s going to be. So I think people have to feel safe to speak up, and then when they do speak up, people have to say thank you and action it.

KH: Yeah, and we it helps people see patterns, doesn’t it? Then we’ve seen this in other, we saw this in the Wells Fargo episode that we recorded a long time ago, and we’ve sort of seen it with things like sexual harassment scandals or abuse scandals with things like Harrods. That, as you say, people knew about it, but didn’t necessarily report it through the channels.

That then meant that other people could see the pattern of what was happening. So that’s such an important point.

TL: Yeah, absolutely, Emma, we’ve had we’ve absolutely loved having you talk about this, and I’ve just got one. I’m going to sneak in one more question, so if that’s okay. So, if a comms director listening could do one thing on Monday to be better prepared for an employee-led crisis, what would it be?

EW: Oh, what a question! Thanks for that. Yeah, I think maybe it has to come back to what Kate was just saying about these patterns and finding out where you can spot those patterns.

So it’s about I would say have a virtual coffee with people who know what’s really happening on the front line. So that’s HR, it’s operations, whoever it is in your organisation, don’t wait until you’re in a crisis to meet them and talk about it. What are they seeing?

How are they? What are their tendrils into the organisation too? What are their eyes and ears looking like?

And agree now. What are the warning signs we’ll share? And what happens when one of you spots something?

Because if the warning signs are an open secret. You want to be aware of that open secret so that you can react before it makes it to YouTube.

Outro

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