Dear Ms Usha Arora,
Senior member of this forum Mr Nathrao has raised precise and logically relevant questions related to your post. I would like to go little deeper.
Two things become well clear from your post. One is the abandonment of the employment by the employee and second one is exasperation of the highest kind that resulted into badmouthing. Why the things came to such a pass? Did you commit something and organisation failed to fulfil the commitment?
During his pre-exit period, clashes with his colleagues or superiors must have happened. How did you address this conflict? What type of this conflict was it? Was it process conflict but later escalated to personal conflict?
The incident merits introspection as well. What was the tenure of the employee, under whom did he work and how were the relations with the Manager? What efforts manager did to address his dissatisfaction? What was his performance?
As the person's tenure progressed, did you reveal that the person was unsuitable to execute his duties? In that case, was it a case of bad recruitment?
As far as negative publicity is concerned, I recommend it to just ignore it. He will cool down over a period of time. There are few portals where employees express their opinions but with fictitious handle. If you refer those websites, you will find that many MNCs or IT majors have come under fire from their past or even current employees. Notwithstanding their criticism, they continue to grow or continue to attract the talent.
Nevertheless, take this as lesson and your may take steps to improve the organisation's culture of the company. You may measure employee satisfaction by conducting Employee Satisfaction Survey (ESS). You may train your managers and HR in interviewing skills. Next thing you may do is quantification of the work. Are the KPIs/KRAs for each department well defined? If yes, then do you recruit the people on these KRAs? How about employee training? What type of training do you conduct? Have you trained your managers on interpersonal skills?
Lastly, person of your stature should not have raised this query at all. In fact nobody from your company should have raised this query in public forum. In your post, you have not provided any context or background information. Your post is shorter than permissible limit of an SMS! Is your post compatible with your stature? Does it not cast you in poor light?
Your company provides HR consulting services. Testimonials from your client are made visible prominently on your website. Notwithstanding all this, you have approached this HR forum to take advice when separation of some employee turned bitter. Should the members of this forum consider your post as proverbial darkness beneath a shining lamp?
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar