Yesterday the news was filled with mobile phone imagery of disgruntled staff at BMW throwing fruit, with soundbites from furious workers after being told they were losing their jobs with immediate effect.
It is not often you find a PR saying “no news is good news”, but this is one such scenario. With the economic situation hitting the headlines daily, redundancies made at Mini one of Britain’s biggest car manufacturers was bound to make the mainstream news, but with considered crisis planning it could have been handled so much better – for the staff in question and for BMW’s brand reputation.
You can only speculate about how this was planned internally, but it also smacks of a lack of influence or involvement of the communications team. Surely they would have foreseen the tidal wave of negative coverage from such an abrupt approach and would have advised against it – if so, the powers that be obviously didn’t listen. In matters such as this, we believe the communications team should be absolutely involved and consulted in the process, not just left to sweep the mess under the carpet after the event.
For a big organisation with a massive presence in the local community, when you’ve got news such as this to deliver, it can sometimes be advisable to work in partnership with key media to involve them and manage the message being delivered. Obviously this depends on the particular situation in hand, but it has worked well for us in our experience of a similar scenario with a blue-chip company.
Perhaps BMW were under the impression that because the workers in question were agency staff, that it would not be considered as important? There’s a lesson here – in this climate, every job loss is considered important.
On a much more fundamental level, perhaps BMW should review how it values and treats its staff – permanent or temporary, whatever their level. There is no easy way to be told you are losing your job in this current climate, but perhaps the powers that be at BMW ought to consider more how they would like to be treated if they found themselves in similar shoes.
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