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Employee Subreddits: HR’s Biggest Nightmare & Opportunity for Advocacy

Reddit is often thought of as a consumer product, similar to search engines like Google or social media platforms like TikTok. It’s rarely thought of as an internal business tool on the same wavelength as LinkedIn or Glassdoor. For major brands, however, this is a crucial error.

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Most of the Fortune 500, and a number of companies outside of that scale, have subreddits entirely dedicated to employees talking with each other. They prepare strategies to negotiate raises, discuss incompetent management, and hope the company does great to boost their own career. Sometimes, all that is done in one post!

HR departments are rarely in the conversation about social media strategy, and almost never beyond that. This is a big mistake.

When monitored, employee subreddits are essentially a crystal ball into your most outspoken staff. They provide countless answers, in a far more transparent fashion than the “anonymous survey” of yesteryear. They’re even more important than internal communications, since many of these message boards encourage conversation with the company’s customers as well, letting them in on the backroom chatter they normally wouldn’t be able to hear.

If you’re lucky enough to have an employee subreddit, you’ll want to check it daily to make sure you can do your job as Director of HR, Chief of People, or another internal facing role.

Below is a full list of each of the top 10 US employers‘ unofficial subreddits exclusively for employees:

Only two companies out of the top 10 don’t have large (above 500 members) subreddits for this purpose:

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