Employee reviews have become a vital component of the job search for many people in their career, for a number of reasons. Whether you’re looking for a different perspective on a company before you apply or am looking for alternative options from your current job, a review could be the tipping factor in your decision.

As a result, if you’re running a company, you need to be ready to handle employee reviews on various online platforms like Glassdoor, Indeed, Vault, Twitter and others. Positive consumer reviews also play an important role, too. After all, it’s one thing to have words of affirmation from insiders: but it’s entirely another to have local reviews from consumers who know and understand the product. For example, these Welcome Wagon reviews demonstrate how local businesses use the platform to illustrate great service to their customers and clients.

Not only are employee and customer reviews important for your business’s bottom line, but they can actually improve your company’s profile from the outside, and culture internally. Here are some ways that you may be able to turn something that bosses dread into a positive.

Show You Follow Feedback

Employee feedback is one of the strongest opportunities for you to improve morale as a boss. Your company culture is the set of values that you espouse internally and externally, but you need to take into account how well you are actually doing this, and employee feedback is one of the best ways to do so. Ideally, your employees will feel comfortable enough to be able to express their feelings to you or a supervisor, which you can then take into account. However, this isn’t always possible, so online employee feedback may provide a way to candidly see what employees are thinking.

Granted, every piece of feedback may not be actionable, and depending on the nature of the review, it may fall into the category of rant more than feedback. However, if you start seeing multiple negative online reviews covering some of the same topics, you may have a potential issue that needs addressing. When employees see you welcoming their potential input, not only do they feel more secure in their jobs, they are more likely to offer suggestions unprompted. You’d be surprised what great ideas have stemmed from an employee’s idea. You can get a lot of mileage from this transparency when you’re trying to make your company the best workplace possible.

Boosting Your Brand

Many companies try to refine and defend their brands at all costs, which is part of the reason why handling employee reviews can be such a potentially rough issue. Employers are subject to their own regulations, meaning that you can’t respond any way you would like, but there is a right and a wrong way to go about things.

For starters, one of the best things you can do is to respond openly and graciously. One survey shows that 69% of an employer’s brand users have an improved perception when an executive responds to reviews.  In general, be quick and create a schedule for someone from the executive team to respond. Ideally, you want to do so in the first few days the review goes up. Handle the complaints with empathy in order to add a human aspect to your brand, something that many companies would love to maintain. There may be some exceptions though, like small reviews that are more of a complaint than an assessment. In this case, you may be best served being silent if there is no hope of spinning things into a positive.

Make Your Office Safe

A simple office building can harbor plenty of hidden dangers. Those “dangers” might seem trivial to you, but it’s better to err on the side of caution and adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach to office safety.  Not only will safer offices provide a more comfortable atmosphere, but it could also prevent your employees from getting hurt on the job—and prevent your business from a potential personal injury lawsuit.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 80,000 administrative employees and private-industry office workers were injured on the job. Falls were a big factor. Simple things like investing in organization tools will help keep your office clutter-free. Ergonomic injuries are also high on the list; provide your team with comfortable, adjustable furniture. You can even go the extra mile by adding midday exercise programs and fitness classes to your weekly schedule.

Make Your Company A More Appealing Place To Be

The fact of the matter is that there are more educated and skilled professionals looking to fill the roles at your company than there have ever been. As a result, you want any asset you have in order to stand above the rest of your industry, and how you handle employee reviews may play a big role.

Put yourself in a job seeker’s shoes. What do you want to do about a company that you’re applying to? How do they operate? Do they value their employees? What is their mission? All these questions and how a company solves them become a part of company culture. It’s been proven that why people work has a major impact on how well they work. Everything you do should help your employees and customers answer the question of why.

As a result, how you handle employee reviews online tells a lot about your company. If you try to quash things or drown them out, people see you as paranoid or with something to hide, not the type of working environment you want to join. However, handled properly, this allows for the opportunity to showcase your transparency, one of the values that more and more people want from a company. So, before you start fretting over that review an ex-employee posted, consider the potential to improve your company’s image with how you handle it.