One of the great things about working in PR is the variety. No two days are the same and if you’re working with the media, let’s face it, anything can happen. It’s also a competitive industry. There seems to be no shortage of PR graduates looking for jobs and the numbers of journalists wanting to move across to PR is increasing.
The problem the PR industry has, is retaining that talent. When I started my career in 1998, PR, at least in agency land, was very much about ‘climbing the ladder’ – from account executive, to senior account executive and so on. It was about money and status.
Today and in the future, talent retention has got to be about flexibility. In your early 20s, you don’t mind so much putting in the 12 hour days, heading into the office five days a week. Your work life and social life blur together. Once you get into your 30s, the novelty starts to wear off.
Forget the ‘duvet days’
Agency HR teams can come up with as many duvet days, cakes on your birthdays, or free massages as they like. Having worked in a number of agencies both in the U.K. and Australia, what many are failing to provide is true flexibility and accountability.
Yes, the media cycle today is 24/7. Yes, editorial teams are shrinking and journalists have to write increasing numbers of stories every day. If your job involves working with the media, social or otherwise, you need to be putting in those hours, chained to the desk. Right? Wrong.
Focus on outcomes
The problem, as a female dominated industry, is even more acute after women have had children. There is a reason why there are so few people in PR agency land after the age of 35. They’ve either burnt out, gone freelance looking for flexibility or in-house, choosing to work for companies that offer more than a few weeks paid paternity leave.
As an industry, we have to get better at making flexible work, work. The focus should always be on the deliverables, rather than the hours spent in the office. In PR agency land, you’ve no doubt seen the following: PR goes on paternity leave to come back ‘three days a week’, which as we all know, is four or five, just squashed into three days, to find she (let’s face it, it’s usually a she) is not ‘allowed’ to do client or media facing work. ‘What if the client calls her on her day off?’ So she’s left to write case studies and media releases. She gets bored. She leaves. She goes freelance or finds herself a job in-house.
Scrap the hierarchy
As if coming back to the PR industry isn’t hard enough. Already a tough job, being away from the industry for even six months, journalists have moved on, publications have folded, new ones started, clients have come and gone, existing ones have changed their focus – it’s so incredibly hard to get back into. You can’t just rock up and start rolling out the lesson plan you delivered last year.
One of the reasons I left my agency job in Australia was because I couldn’t work one day every couple of weeks at home. ‘You have a team to manage’ my boss would say. And there I think lies the problem. Not only do we have to embrace flexibility in our industry and give people the tools they need to work from anywhere they choose, but we need to scrap the hierarchy.
Trust is key
We have to get away from the ‘what you can’t see you can’t manage’ mindset. If we had more trust in the PR industry, between ‘employer and employee’, we wouldn’t need ‘managers’. We don’t have them at BENCH. We didn’t have them at an agency I worked for in the U.K. We had a flat structure. And it worked. It does work, extremely well.
Companies in the U.S. such as Zappos have scrapped their managers. Australian companies such as Atlassian and Canva are following suit. It’s a bold move for PR agencies which have structured themselves this way for decades, but it just doesn’t work. Staff churn remains too high and the client suffers. They have a new ‘account manager’ to bring up to speed every three months. And pity the journalist who has to try to remember the PR’s name.
Finding good PR talent is always going to be a challenge and that won’t change in the future. What we need to stop is the ‘burnout’ and offer flexible roles (and decent paternity leave) to enable both men and women to continue working in the PR industry or be able to come back. We have to trust that the people we work with, will do their jobs to the best of their ability and it’s up to us, as employers, to provide them with the flexibility and tools they need, to do just that.
The Exciting Potential of Virtual Reality Journalism
By Jenna OwsianikWe are at the threshold of virtual reality becoming part of our everyday experiences.
Affordable head-mounted displays like Google Cardboard are already available to the public, giving widespread consumer access to people with smartphones. The consumer version of the Oculus Rift, a highly anticipated VR headset, is slated for release in early 2016, with competitors like Playstation’s Project Morpheus also waiting to make their debuts.
For the news industry, virtual reality’s impact on storytelling and media consumption could be transformative. Instead of just sharing a story, journalists can digitally plant viewers into unfolding events, giving them truly immersive experiences.
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Below are some noteworthy projects embracing VR journalism and how they are impacting this emerging field.
The New York Times – “The Displaced”
This month, The New York Times mailed its subscribers more than one million Google Cardboard VR viewers so they could watch its film “The Displaced.” Created with virtual reality production company Vrse, the 10-minute feature explores the stories of children forced away from their respective homes in Syria, South Sudan, and the Ukraine.
To watch the virtual reality film, viewers must download the free NYT VR app available on iOS and Android. This move is being considered a major milestone is bringing immersive journalism to the masses. Instead of only giving access to the few people with pricey VR developer headsets, it is offering inexpensive tools to the everyday person at no cost.
USC School of Cinematic Arts – “Project Syria”
Covering the plight of refugees with virtual reality is becoming popular. According to writer and director Nonny de la Peña, the medium evokes a feeling of presence and an emotional understanding of what the subjects are going through. With this form of storytelling, her aim is to encourage people to think about how they can help bring about change.
Her film “Project Syria”, which premiered at the 2014 World Economic Forum, is a digital recreation of an explosion on a busy street and of life inside a refugee camp. de la Peña built the scenes based on actual audio, photographs, and videos captured at the events.
Los Angeles Times – “Discovering Gale Crater”
“Discovering Gale Crater” is a virtual reality audio tour of the Mars landmark that was explored by the Curiosity rover. It is available on Google Cardboard, an Oculus Rift developer kit, or a standard computer. The 3D project allows viewers to explore the crater on their own or be guided by NASA geoscientist Fred J. Calef III.
The Los Angeles Times took on the project to determine how journalism can benefit from telling stories with virtual reality. The publication found a serious setback is that even when the tour ran smoothly, people using VR devices often felt dizzy and disoriented. There is clearly more work to be done to improve user experience. However, the interactive also represents a hopeful future for sharing remote, natural environments most people will never visit.
The Future of VR Storytelling
Television screens have separated us from the scenes of news stories, but virtual reality is making the audience part of them. There is immense possibility for journalists to create more engaging and stirring films with this medium. There is also a huge potential to attract younger audiences, many of whom may be interested in gaming and emerging VR technology.
There have also been words of caution about virtual reality journalism. In a letter to The New York Times, former managing editor of The Washington Post Robert Kaiser warned it is vulnerable to tricks and deceptions in how camera people choose to weave images together. This can distort how unfolding action is presented, and suit what the reporter wants the audience to see.
Laying out other potential ethical issues, The Associated Press Standards Editor Tom Kent suggests creating a code of ethics to overcome challenges and ensure fair and accurate reporting.
With the age of immersive journalism newly upon us, there is no better time than now to begin having these conversations. As consumer VR devices become more affordable and mainstream, there will likely be increasing demand for compatible content. The media organizations that can work out the kinks and streamline a set of best practices in advance will have the most to gain.
Image source: Nonny de la Peña
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The Final Decade of the Single-Practice Agency
By Lucy AllenEveryone’s talking about it. The end of the marketing silo. The rise of the full-stack marketer. Buyers expect a seamless experience from a brand, which means online, offline, mobile and social all converge under a single marketing strategy. Paid, owned and earned tactics all complement and reinforce each other.
But what does this all mean for the client-agency relationship? How do we evolve in the era of integrated marketing?
Set business goals, not channel-specific goals
As a starting point, we all need to be better at focusing on the end goal. What is the business impact we are aiming to achieve? Too often this intention gets derailed at the RFP process. We still see a surprising number of RFPs in which the stated goals are tactical at best. So the objective is to increase awareness. Among which audience? Why? What is the desired business outcome? Driving demand by getting a seat at the table more often? Or addressing a perception issue among shareholders to improve valuation? While it is the agency’s responsibility to ask these questions, it is the client’s to be able to answer them. Too often the answers show a lack of internal understanding about the objective. The reason? Usually it’s because the in-house communications team is not connected enough to the sales and marketing groups.
It is also becoming increasingly important for agencies to understand their clients’ customer journey. At every stage of the journey, what are the likely preconceptions, concerns and objections? Campaigns need to be developed to address each stage. For example, top of funnel awareness can be improved with a campaign designed to reach customers as they experience the problems your client solves. Using keyword analysis you can anticipate the issues they are most concerned about and develop relevant content. A multi-channel approach allows you to syndicate that content through traditional media placements, your own social channels and paid social and mobile media. You might also use this content for webinars or physical events and, of course bring it all together with a targeted email campaign. This single example requires SEO, content, media relations, direct marketing, events and advertising teams to collaborate at every step.
Customer-centric replaces channel-centric marketing
Of course, the changing nature of marketing means in-house teams are evolving too. Where marketing teams may have been segmented by product or channel in the past, they must now be organized by customer. The idea that each marketing group could have its own agency, is quickly becoming redundant. How will you ensure a handshake between the thought leadership campaign targeting your C-level customers, and the paid amplification of that content? You do it by bringing it all under an agency that has both multiple skills and focused domain expertise relevant to your customer base.
The challenge for agencies is how to balance the need for specialist skills with a generalist approach. Full-stack marketers are rare, so clients need to complement their own in-house capabilities with skilled expertise within their agency. Yet, for efficiency’s sake, they also want strategists and account managers who can lace complex multi-channel campaigns together into a cohesive whole.
Specialists are from Mars, generalists are from Venus
Meanwhile, in agency land, specialists need leadership from someone who understands their field. They want career paths that allow them to go deeper rather than broader. Different specialists may flourish in different working environments and charge different day rates. Try managing a graphic designer, analyst and crisis comms specialist in the same way and the results will be interesting to say the least.
Advertising agencies have traditionally addressed this by separating creative, planning and account management teams. PR agencies have favored a more vertical approach with generalists handling strategy, content, media relations and account management all at once. In the brave new world of integrated marketing, a dominant model has not yet been found.
At LEWIS, we’re favoring a networked model. We have teams specializing in PR, digital, marketing and advertising. Then we are developing the account manager level across all units to oversee fully integrated campaigns. Our Marketing Services group was recently expanded to give clients and teams access to broad marketing strategy for any campaign. Project teams are organized around clients and work as one, to deliver results across every channel.
We predict that we will see the end of the single-practice agency by the end of the decade. Holding companies, which have promulgated the specialist agency model for years because it allows them to maximize revenues across multiple agency brands, will find it the hardest to change. The new normal will be agencies that are organized by client, be it by sector (technology, consumer) or by stage (emerging companies, global companies). These agencies will have a flexible, single P&L structure that allows seamless collaboration between teams without revenue or turf wars getting in the way.
It will take an investment in training and significant organizational shift. But it is the right thing to do for clients, their customers and the future of communications.
Virtual Reality is Here To Stay, Now What to Do With It
By Aaron HeinrichA recent communication trend study released by Hotwire PR, indicates virtual reality (VR) could begin playing a more significant role in the coming year as companies use it to bridge the pervasiveness of increasing amounts of data with the desire by customers to experience a brand before buying. While the study identified several other trends – for instance, how advertising will be forced to change with the popularity of ad blocking and how Millennials can no longer be treated as a single demographic – its point of view on VR was the most interesting.
For the uninitiated, VR didn’t recently come to fruition with Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift or the popularity of role playing games. Jaron Lanier, considered one of the earlier pioneers of VR, gained notoriety in the 80s and 90s by introducing the first VR gloves and goggles. But the company he had co-founded to commercialize VR products eventually went bankrupt. The patents for the products Lanier helped develop were eventually bought by Sun Microsystems, and Sun was eventually bought by Oracle. Lanier now works for Microsoft. Who knows what Oracle has done with his patents today?
Since then, VR has continued to have fits and starts. More recently, 3D TV was supposed to give us a more immersive experience. How many people watch 3D TV. But the Hotwire study points out that the hardware issues that have stood in the way of greater mass adoption of VR seem to be rapidly working themselves out. Entertainment and gaming are what will evidently drive the pervasiveness of the hardware.
But as the study points out, there will be more to VR than play. The travel industry is already experimenting with ways to use it to provide travelers with a virtual look at a destination, a hotel or even a mode of transport. Earlier this year, Marriott experimented with a 4D experience that allowed travelers to be able to see, hear and even feel what it would be like to be in various destinations.
The non-profit industry is another potential VR adopter. With prospective donors suffering from “donation request fatigue,” non-profits are being forced to find more ways to move people to give. According to the Hotwire report, Amnesty International used VR to give people a more realistic experience of the crisis situation in Syria. The result was not only an increase in donations, but also an uptick in online chatter about the experience and the crisis.
What’s evidently driving all of this is not an increased fascination with VR, but the fact that companies are finally seeing the potential for VR to bridge the daily onslaught of data with the desire to experience a brand before committing to it. In other words, developing emotional connections in the absence of physical presence.
There’s a slippery slope here, though, because just as social media has been targeted as being as much a bane as a boon for society, VR is bound to be at the receiving end of an even greater potential backlash. After all, it is removing the end user even further from the physical present than a text, post or shared photo ever will. Communicators and content creators who contemplate using VR will need to keep this in mind and not treat it as one more communication tool to tick off a list of others that have come before.
For the public relations industry, this also means getting even more comfortable with the idea that emotional connections are driven by providing consumers with immersive experiences. The more immersive the better. Any type of service or product demo is essentially an immersive experience and an opportunity to bond with a prospective customer.
What VR can deliver are experiences that are even more immersive and reveal aspects of a company, service or product in ways that have never before been available. In an age when consumers are also demanding even greater transparency to go with their immersion, this can only be a good thing for everyone involved.
The Most Creative Agencies Inspire Purpose and Empower Consumers
By Aaron HeinrichA couple of weeks ago, the Holmes Report issued their fourth annual Global Creative Index and the results found Weber Shandwick on top of the overall agency ranking after placing third last year.
The Holmes Report analyzes the entries and winners of more than 25 different award programs to determine agency placement in their index. Weber had a plethora of awards, including three top-10 campaigns that included ‘World Hunger Relief’, ‘Danone Nutricia Crisis’ and ‘Who Framed Master Kong.’
Here’s a list of the other agencies in the top ten this year compared to last year. The global agencies dominate if for no other reason than the sheer volume of awards they can enter.
The Holmes Report also indexed agencies according to head count or what they referred to as a “pound for pound” calculation of the most creative agencies in the world. The result is that none of the big names on the list above ended up on the list below, and the list is fairly diverse when it comes to geography. That may or may not be proof that size and location influence an agency’s level of creativity. However, it does suggest that the resources of a large agency don’t necessarily guarantee a creative bent.
Campaigns themselves were also indexed and Always #LikeAGirl developed by MSL Group and Leo Burnett took top honors by a significant margin. It’s core message of girl empowerment “...aimed to turn an insult into a movement for confidence among teenage girls.” The Holmes Report developed this particular ranking by using a formula that emphasized the Best in Show winners of the awards programs it incorporated into its overall index.
The results of the indexed campaigns reveal a few trends in the combination of content and execution of the winning campaigns:
It will be interesting to see who ends up in the index next year and just how many campaigns will continue to reflect these trends. In the meantime, anyone who believes that creativity and PR are not aligned, need only look at the index to be proven otherwise.
Why Flexibility is Key to Retaining PR Talent
By Jocelyn HunterOne of the great things about working in PR is the variety. No two days are the same and if you’re working with the media, let’s face it, anything can happen. It’s also a competitive industry. There seems to be no shortage of PR graduates looking for jobs and the numbers of journalists wanting to move across to PR is increasing.
The problem the PR industry has, is retaining that talent. When I started my career in 1998, PR, at least in agency land, was very much about ‘climbing the ladder’ – from account executive, to senior account executive and so on. It was about money and status.
Today and in the future, talent retention has got to be about flexibility. In your early 20s, you don’t mind so much putting in the 12 hour days, heading into the office five days a week. Your work life and social life blur together. Once you get into your 30s, the novelty starts to wear off.
Forget the ‘duvet days’
Agency HR teams can come up with as many duvet days, cakes on your birthdays, or free massages as they like. Having worked in a number of agencies both in the U.K. and Australia, what many are failing to provide is true flexibility and accountability.
Yes, the media cycle today is 24/7. Yes, editorial teams are shrinking and journalists have to write increasing numbers of stories every day. If your job involves working with the media, social or otherwise, you need to be putting in those hours, chained to the desk. Right? Wrong.
Focus on outcomes
The problem, as a female dominated industry, is even more acute after women have had children. There is a reason why there are so few people in PR agency land after the age of 35. They’ve either burnt out, gone freelance looking for flexibility or in-house, choosing to work for companies that offer more than a few weeks paid paternity leave.
As an industry, we have to get better at making flexible work, work. The focus should always be on the deliverables, rather than the hours spent in the office. In PR agency land, you’ve no doubt seen the following: PR goes on paternity leave to come back ‘three days a week’, which as we all know, is four or five, just squashed into three days, to find she (let’s face it, it’s usually a she) is not ‘allowed’ to do client or media facing work. ‘What if the client calls her on her day off?’ So she’s left to write case studies and media releases. She gets bored. She leaves. She goes freelance or finds herself a job in-house.
Scrap the hierarchy
As if coming back to the PR industry isn’t hard enough. Already a tough job, being away from the industry for even six months, journalists have moved on, publications have folded, new ones started, clients have come and gone, existing ones have changed their focus – it’s so incredibly hard to get back into. You can’t just rock up and start rolling out the lesson plan you delivered last year.
One of the reasons I left my agency job in Australia was because I couldn’t work one day every couple of weeks at home. ‘You have a team to manage’ my boss would say. And there I think lies the problem. Not only do we have to embrace flexibility in our industry and give people the tools they need to work from anywhere they choose, but we need to scrap the hierarchy.
Trust is key
We have to get away from the ‘what you can’t see you can’t manage’ mindset. If we had more trust in the PR industry, between ‘employer and employee’, we wouldn’t need ‘managers’. We don’t have them at BENCH. We didn’t have them at an agency I worked for in the U.K. We had a flat structure. And it worked. It does work, extremely well.
Companies in the U.S. such as Zappos have scrapped their managers. Australian companies such as Atlassian and Canva are following suit. It’s a bold move for PR agencies which have structured themselves this way for decades, but it just doesn’t work. Staff churn remains too high and the client suffers. They have a new ‘account manager’ to bring up to speed every three months. And pity the journalist who has to try to remember the PR’s name.
Finding good PR talent is always going to be a challenge and that won’t change in the future. What we need to stop is the ‘burnout’ and offer flexible roles (and decent paternity leave) to enable both men and women to continue working in the PR industry or be able to come back. We have to trust that the people we work with, will do their jobs to the best of their ability and it’s up to us, as employers, to provide them with the flexibility and tools they need, to do just that.
Business Leaders Debate: Are Corporate Social Responsibility and PR Necessary?
By Chris SorekA recent UK PR Week headline article, PR and CSR departments? Ditch them, says former BP chief Browne, raises an interesting question.
“Businesses are there to co-operate, to work with society. Businesses have to be engaged very radically with everybody who is affected by them – [and] tell the truth,” Lord Browne stated.
But who will do this?
Lord Browne headed BP when there was a fatal explosion at the company’s Texas City, Texas plant on March 23, 2005 that claimed 15 lives and resulted in fines and awards. It was under his tenure that BP’s Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico received five citations for non-compliance (safety and pollution). That’s the same well that in 2010 caused one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.
Did BP think crises like these would hurt its business? The simple answer is yes. That’s why BP carried out costly, multi-year brand communications and public affairs campaigns to win back the trust of consumers, business partners and other stakeholders.
However, those are the same CSR/PR programs that Lord Browne called a ‘prop’ which he says has “allowed a lot of companies to detach the activity of communicating and being involved with stakeholders almost into a side-pocket.”
So are corporate social responsibility programs important?
In a recent post How brands can change the world, Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever, appears to believe integrating brands with issues can make a difference.
At the launch of the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development, Mr. Weed said:
So, while Lord Browne sees
What he might really be saying is that CSR and PR need to be at the ‘table’. As Mr. Weed put it,
So, should CSR and PR be “ditched” as Lord Browne suggests?
No. If CSR and PR are fully integrated with the business, they play a critical role connecting a company to its stakeholders.
Exploring Big Data: Insights for Agencies
By Aaron HeinrichFor several years now, Big Data has been top of mind for a variety of industries, and that includes PR. An extraordinary amount of content has been generated about how it can benefit everything from customer insight to driving efficiencies in just about every industry imaginable. Yet, attitudes about Big Data within PR are mixed. There’s skepticism, based on the assumption that too much of the data that’s collected may be inapplicable to PR, and avoidance since the current level of data available to PR may seem to be just the right amount.
Neither attitude, however, is going to help PR professionals now or in the future because the numbers related to Big Data spending are too large to ignore. Consider that according to research conducted in 2013 by CapGemini, global spending on Big Data exceeded $31 billion and is expected to surpass $114 billion by 2018. Sixty percent of the executives who participated in that survey said they believe that Big Data will disrupt their industry in the next three years. Considering the timing of the survey, that disruption is starting to happen now. If PR wants to be part of helping companies work through that disruption, Big Data adoption or, at the very least, understanding how to use it is key.
Here’s what that same CapGemini survey identified as overall challenges to Big Data adoption and usefulness:
What’s also missing from the above is what any good researcher will tell you: data is fairly useless without analytics. Without analytics, data is just bits and bites taking up storage space on a server somewhere in the middle of who knows where. Evidently, there’s also a lack of analytics when it comes to all of this data.
Here’s where PR can play a role because making sense of data has been a necessity in the profession for decades with an ever-growing need to show results and prove that the needle has been moved. Since that needle has gotten bigger and now sits over multiple channels, Big Data now provides PR with the information the profession has been clamoring for and that is no longer just in the domain of sales and marketing.
An article published last year by Meltwater as part of multi-part look at trends in PR pointed out a few ways those who have already adopted Big Data are using the plethora of bits and bites. Notice that none of the below fall outside the realm of what most PR professionals do now. The only difference is that Big Data provides a much richer pool of information to work with:
While Big Data may be intimidating, PR professionals who don’t make an effort to at least understand it, do so at their own peril. It’s here to stay and is only going to get bigger.
5 Lessons on High-impact Storytelling from General Electric
By Aaron HeinrichA lot has been written over the last couple of years about the preponderance of storytelling and its place in content creation. A couple of weeks ago, Adweek ran an interview with Linda Boff, CMO of General Electric about this topic and how this 125-year old company was approaching storytelling in this digital era.
The idea of GE being an adopter of digital media may seem a bit out of sync for those who may not realize how pervasive innovation is at this legacy brand. As Boff says in the article, “staying modern, contemporary and relevant is something we think about every single day.”
She goes on to point out that innovation and being first has led them to be an early adopter with both existing and emerging social and digital platforms like Snapchat, Vine and Instagram.
They’re also beginning to look at how to use virtual reality as a storytelling tool. The result is that this multinational conglomerate has become a leading voice in branded content.
Image from General Electric’s Vine page.
Image from General Electric’s Instagram page.
Smaller companies with less resources and far fewer years of legacy brand building under their belts may be tempted to conclude that GE can afford such experimentation because they have the resources to do so. They can afford to try and fail, and try again.
While that may be true, no one forced GE to be an early adopter of anything, but a legacy of innovation left them open to doing so. Consequently, there are some inherent learnings companies of all sizes can glean from GE’s approach to both storytelling and digital media.
Image from General Electric’s Wattpad.
While not all companies may have the available content that a company like GE has, every company has the permission to take their storytelling to a new level in this digital era. It requires both commitment and creativity, but the end result can only be of benefit to the company of any size who chooses to do so.
Images: All images from General Electric
The Rise of the PR Freelancer – From Temporary Stop-gap to Long-term Solution
By Susin ThoroughgoodWhen PR agencies engage freelancers, it’s often to help with one-off projects or fill in while someone’s on leave. Freelancers become a quasi-team member for a limited period of time, then when they’re no longer needed they’re off to the next job. Like a Mary Poppins of the PR world.
But the number of freelancers is on the rise – in the U.S. it’s expected that half the workforce will be made up of freelancers by 2020. As more employees leave full time work in favor of flexible working arrangements, there will be as many independent workers as there are salaried staff.
So what does this mean for PR?
In order to move with the times and continue to attract the right consultants, PR agencies will need to shift their thinking about the way they utilize freelancers; not just hiring them as a stop-gap solution, but looking to employ them longer term, working as an integrated part of the team.
A new structure
The PR agency of the future will need to restructure the business to allow for multiple employment options, tailored to individual staff needs. Moving beyond the rigid constraints of full time office-based staff, PR agencies will need to expand the way they work by welcoming independent workers as part of the team; not just as an extra set of hands to pick up the slack, but leading accounts, managing clients, and mentoring staff.
By creating a flexible, independent team of consultants who are able to work in the way they’re most productive – which doesn’t always include a traditional workday – this will mean a more efficient workforce delivering maximum results. As long as PR agencies implement the right procedures and invest in technologies which allow for staff collaboration, freelancers can become as much a part of the team as full time staff.
It’s easier than you think
While some PR agencies are already working with freelancers on a long-term basis, others have reservations about bringing freelancers – especially remote workers – onto the team.
The happily independent workforce
There are many advantages for PR agencies to shift towards a more flexible, freelance workforce. It’s cost effective, it can help reduce over-servicing, and having access to a pool of specialized freelancers means more opportunities for growth.
Most importantly, studies show that freelance workers are not only more productive, but they’re happier than full time employees. Given public relations is continuously ranked as amongst the most stressful professions, it’s time to take a serious look at how PR agencies can change the way they operate by employing independent workers to help create a more sustainable, more enjoyable work environment.
How virtual reality, augmented reality, robots and real-time translation will transform travel
By Ross DawsonBelow is a selection of quotes from the article.
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