Corporate history is rich with examples of employee warnings falling on deaf ears, often with devastating results. See past crises at Theranos, Abbott Nutrition, and Wells Fargo, to name a few. But some companies still make the mistake of repeatedly waving off concerned workers—or at least not taking them seriously enough.
Last week, for example, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times investigated Meta’s alleged inability to safeguard girl influencers featured in mom-run Instagram and Facebook accounts. “What often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children,” the Times wrote, explaining how Meta’s tools help enable this spiral.
Meta employees raised red flags about Instagram functions for monetizing content and recommended strong protocols to protect minors from potential exploitation and abuse, the Journal reported. Meta instead rolled out an automated safety system that was demonstrably ill-equipped to prevent inappropriate content and interactions.
Meanwhile, an FAA inquiry following Boeing’s 737 Max door plug blowout crisis revealed that the aircraft maker’s employees didn’t trust that a program encouraging them to raise safety concerns anonymously was truly anonymous. The program was created in response to the company’s Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, when authorities found Boeing’s culture discouraged whistleblowing and that leadership didn’t react sufficiently or dismissed staffers’ concerns. Employees at Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing’s sole supplier of fuselages, have also claimed that their recent warnings about quality control were shrugged off because of production schedule pressures.
Meta, too, has stood accused of minimizing or dismissing worker complaints about safety in the past, signaling that it has missed a foundational lesson of moral leadership, says Ann Skeet, senior director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “When people bring things to your attention, it’s an opportunity to reset expectations and to clarify culture,” she tells Fortune. “But if the leadership says that we can continue even when people are surfacing things they feel are inconsistent with the organization’s espoused values,” she adds, “it suggests there is another set of values that are actually being applied.”
Those unacknowledged values often prioritize short-term profits and efficiency, of course. Meta’s reliance on algorithms is evidence of that because technology has not developed to a point where algorithms are foolproof, Skeet says. Rather than lean on software, she says a more effective response would involve banning parents from running child-focused accounts. Employees had suggested asking parents running child influencer accounts to register so the company could closely track activity, the Journal reported.
Skeet argues that Meta should probably get out of the child-focused influencer practice entirely, given evidence that its favored approach to stopping predators isn’t working. “The long-term value of its brand has been increasingly associated with horrible outcomes for the people involved with using their products,” she says, pointing to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the sexual exploitation of teens using Meta’s products. “That is not responsible leadership in any way—not on a values basis, not on a bottom-line basis.”
Alla Valente, a senior analyst for the marketing research company Forrester, likewise warns that companies take on enormous risks when they don’t properly heed employee concerns about issues like fraud or moral breaches and fail to institute clear processes for reporting festering problems. The gamble is akin to investing heavily in a dodgy asset or willingly accepting a risk you might otherwise disclose in a securities filing, she says. When a corporate misdeed or negligence becomes widely known, and Valente says it inevitably will, “it’s almost as if the price comes with interest.”
On the other hand, leaders who take whistleblowers seriously help reinforce the companies’ ethical values, improve morale, and can expect an overall reduction in fines and lawsuits, according to research. Whistleblowing, Valente wrote in a recent white paper, is a sign of an engaged culture. Most employees who call attention to problems are tenured staffers who want the company to improve, not disgruntled junior workers looking to throw stones, as some may believe. “It behooves you to take action because if you don’t, the headlines are probably worse than just quietly fixing [the issue],” she says.
“You don’t have to make a big public announcement that, ‘Hey, we found this thing, and now we’re going to fix it,’” she adds. “Just fix it.”
In response to the FAA’s report, Boeing said in an emailed statement to Fortune that it has “taken important steps to foster a safety culture that empowers and encourages all employees to share their voice. But there is more work to do.” Meta shared a statement emphasizing Instagram’s rule that parents or managers must actively manage accounts that represent a minor under age 13. “On top of that, we prevent accounts exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior from using our monetization tools, and we plan to limit such accounts from accessing subscription content,” Meta said.
Corporate leaders often have to balance conflicting pressures from various stakeholders. But Skeet reminds business heads who don’t swiftly rectify ethical lapses that they’re hurting not only the reputation of their brand but the people who work for it. “Part of your brand promise to your employees is, ‘I’m creating a good environment for you, and you’re going to actually learn skills here that you can take to other places,’” she says.
In reality, when staff at scandalized companies leave to work elsewhere, they are sometimes viewed as tainted with potentially questionable habits and principles. Rather than their Silicon Valley experience acting as a feather in one’s cap, Skeet says, “these employees have to convince people to hire them, even though they’ve worked at Meta.”
