Effectiveness in PR/communications practice usually involves thinking about evaluation and measurement metrics. But what about the human aspects of how we as individuals – and collectively – can improve our professional practice?
This PRConversations conversational post examines the importance of happiness as a performance improvement trigger. I’ve discussed this interesting proposition by email with David Sawyer, a successful UK PR consultant, who starts with the story behind his new book, RESET: an unconventional early retirement plan for midlife (salaried) careerists who want to be happy.
David Sawyer
Almost five years ago now (was it that long?) I struck out on my own and set up a one-man band PR consultancy, Zude PR. Before that, I’d won oodles of awards, including one from the United Nations, and ended up heading a big city office of a global PR firm for five years. I had a great job, great colleagues, lovely family, lots of money, but no time, and felt that the dreams I’d had as a kid were floating away on a sea of twice-a-day lattes, “content wheels” and kids’ plastic toys.
One day I looked around and decided there must be more to life than this. I felt a bit trapped, without any sort of plan, and decided to do something about it.
If you read as many self-improvement books as I do, you could say “I’ve been on a journey”. This 2,000-day odyssey has led to a perhaps different perspective that can help public relations professionals in the same boat I was to be a little bit happier in their lives, and ergo, a little bit better at their jobs.
So, to kick off with, I have three contentions.
- Life is about the pursuit of happiness. And that this comes through finding meaning and purpose. That’s contention one.
- Contention two is that the vast majority (87 per cent) of people globally either hate their jobs or are disengaged at work. This is not a good thing. Given public relations is consistently cited as one of the world’s top 10 most stressful professions, I have no reason to think our industry is any better than others in this respect.
- And contention three is that the technological advancements that are transforming the way we live, work, eat and play in the evolutionary blink of an eye, that have opened up a world of opportunity to us all, that are changing beyond all recognition how we “do PR”, are also, in the guise of smartphones and social media, turning us into addicts with the attention spans of excitable puppies.
Dr. Heather Yaxley
Conventional wisdom is that there is a causal relationship between job satisfaction and performance. Among the many reasons for occupational stress, studies cite a lack of control. Undoubtedly the pressures and volatility of working in PR/communications (as I discussed recently with Nigel Sarbutts) contribute towards feelings of losing control and being unhappy at work.
I also wonder whether disillusion may be inherent in PR/communications careers and act as a brake on long-term effectiveness. When I interviewed women about working in PR in the 1970s and 1980s, they universally described their initial experiences as ‘exciting’ having moved into the occupation by accident. However, career moves were commonly reported to be the result of dissatisfaction. One woman said:
“I woke up one day and didn’t think I’d been to University – that my mother and father had scrimped and saved – for me to promote toilet cleaner, so I decided to move”.
This fits with research by Jacquie L’Etang, illustrated by a similar recollection by a female practitioner:
“The thought that my life should be restricted by some sort of external power that although I had a degree all I’m fit for as a woman is to run a cosmetic account was something I really thought was too much.”
More recently a study by Shannon Bowen (published in 2003) reported surprise among public relations undergraduates that the work was less glamorous than they had expected. Likewise, Liz Bridgen cites a common reason for women opting to leave the occupation is that “public relations work, even at senior level, was trivial, meaningless and dull.”
Are you suggesting that rather than such disillusion and discontent resulting in a high level of churn and change within public relations careers, we can reset our happiness and in turn improve productivity within professional practice?
David Sawyer
Interesting, Heather, interesting. I don’t think public relations is any different from the majority of jobs or professions, really. Name me one person with 12 weeks to live who would regret having not spent more time PR’ing/lawyering/accounting/running a small business…you get my drift.
People nearing the end of their lives regret unfulfilled dreams, missing their kids growing up, working too hard, not saying what they thought, not spending enough time nurturing friendships. In short, not realising, until it’s too late, that there was another way.
I agree with some of the experiences of PR practitioners that you mention above. No one as a child says: “When I grow up I want to be a PR man” (unless their surname is Sawyer…my kids are just young enough to want to be just like their dad when they grew up). However, this is not to say PR doesn’t have its attractions.
From the variety of people and professions you rub up against to the buzzy nature of the job, the intellectual stimulation, the writing/telling stories, and, of course, the pay. And within its environs, just as in any other profession, you can find very meaningful work.
Which brings me to my main point. What I’m saying is that, just like the other 87% of the world’s population that are either unhappy or disengaged at work, as PR people there is something we can do about it. Without ditching our jobs, without leaving our partners. Taking no more time than we spend every day glued to our phones. But it involves seeing ourselves as people, not PR people.
Instead of focussing all our working attention on dodging the bullets of corporate life and advancing our careers, we need to find out what we want out of life and take a series of practical steps to take control, at home and at work. To live a life free of cognitive dissonance (saying we stand for one thing and doing the opposite).
And it’s only through doing this that we’ll fulfil our potential, future-proof our careers and become, over time, a little bit happier. One final thing, while it sounds as simple as pressing a button, resetting our lives is anything but. It requires hard graft for the rest of our days, new habits and a change of mindset. But if people follow the advice in my book, and carry out its recommendations, within a year they will have transformed their future.
And yes, if we’re happier in ourselves, we’re more efficient, effective and productive at work. And in our case, that work just so happens to be public relations.
Dr. Heather Yaxley
Thank you for explaining more of your thinking David – and your book provides an engaging and insightful approach for individuals to bring more happiness into their lives and hence improve their performance at work. It also connects with the concept of customised careers where adaptive strategies are used to respond to work-related changes and meet personal needs.
This raises a couple of additional thoughts. First, relates to the role of employers, and other work-related influencers. There is a very individualistic focus in thinking about work and careers in PR/communications that is evident in both the literature and practice. Again this is not exclusive to our field. Yet my research confirms that alongside such personal agency, we need to consider proxy agency (whereby other people act as career influencers within a personal or professional context), and collective agency (involving communal action).
The psychologist, David Blustein, indicates that such a relational matrix offers mutual emotional and instrumental support. For me this suggests that we should consider how employers, and our trust networks (communities of relations and interdependencies) contribute toward our mental well-being – both positively and negatively. These may constitute things outside our control. Or there may be ways in which others can improve our sense of happiness.
My other thought relates to whether and how we could – or should – measure happiness. Have you come across the work looking at happiness metrics within agile team working? Some teams include personal assessment on a scale of happiness in a daily scrum or sprint retrospectives – although this has been criticised for being both subjective and a poor metric.
I believe that there is scope to use techniques of reflective practice within teams, which would embrace subjective and objective experiences. Reflexivity could help to develop more of an understanding of individual and relational happiness and well-being. Further, perhaps collaborative communities could help to address barriers to happiness, using an approach that Engeström calls knotworking.
Do you think that employers and other influencers have a role in enhancing happiness – and should we consider developing key performance indicators for mental-well of individuals and teams?
David Sawyer
On your first point, community, I couldn’t agree with you more. Studies consistently show that being part of a community, especially playing an active part in a community, is important for happiness, as everyone who volunteers at their kids’ sports club or turns up every month at the PTA will testify.
But you also find that it’s the same people who give their time to the local football club as run the Scout pack, while 95 per cent of us show up every week to pick our kids up and let the others take the strain. I think what I’m getting at is that relying on others is all very well, but if we want to be one of the 5% who make a contribution, thereby increasing our happiness, we have to make a conscious decision ourselves to do so.
Change has to come from within, and unless we’re ill, we only have ourselves to blame.
Let me give you an example. a few years ago Stephen Waddington saw that there was a plethora of tools springing up that could help PRs do their job better. So he took it upon himself, eg he took individual action, to ask fellow PRs to join him in cataloguing these tools, under the project banner of #PRstack.
He took individual action to get this community off the ground, and I took individual action to get involved. The reason I got involved was I’d seen him speak in Glasgow as part of his grand tour as president of the CIPR, outlining his 10 priorities for the CIPR that year. Again, this was something he didn’t have to do. Both of us took action and both benefited immensely from the experience.
Action always beats inaction, every day of the week.
One of the hardest lessons in life to learn is that, aside from your friends and family, nobody cares about you. They only care what they can get out of you. So you have to decide what is your contribution going to be, and it’s only through taking proactive steps to make a contribution that happiness will ensue.
You can spend all your time thinking your employer should have done this, or your industry body should be doing this, or wouldn’t it be great if, or it used to be like this, but the only thing you can control is your actions.
And that’s, in essence, what the plan I outline in RESET is all about: taking control of your one and only life and making it count from this day forward.
I confess I’m not familiar with happiness metrics within agile team working. And yes, I do think that employers and other influencers have a role in enhancing happiness. We all pick up mentors (whether employers or not) as we stumble through life, and it’s these “believing mirrors” who influence our development as people, and as practitioners.
Last, yes, wouldn’t it be great if we had a happiness indicator, like one of those level indicators on Duracell batteries, some way of tracking how we/members of our team feel? The UN releases a yearly happiness report rating countries; imagine if we could invent a real-time indicator for people (I am sure Facebook will corner the market in that, too, sometime soon). Wouldn’t the world be a better place?
Dr. Heather Yaxley
I really like the self-help focus of your book. You write from personal experience and speak directly to those able to take action and reset their lives. I agree totally that the choices we make have a big impact, and for many of us, that includes how we feel about ourselves, our work and careers.
This doesn’t preclude the influence of others. You were motivated by Stephen Waddington, and are motivating your readers through your book. It is undoubtedly easier to make changes when we have the support of friends, family, colleagues and those we may not know well.
We are more likely to continue to take action, boost our happiness and improve performance through coaching, good management, and involvement in collaborative communities. Similarly, we can make a difference in how others feel as employers, friends, colleagues.
Indeed, we improve our own mental health and that of those around us by acting together, including overcoming challenges that we cannot address alone.
We don’t just control our own actions, but we can influence – and are influenced by – the actions of others. I disagree with your life lesson that “nobody cares about you” apart from friends and family.
In the UK, the 2017-18 Community Life Survey reports that 65% of us take part in volunteering, with 22% of adults formally volunteering once a month. Individual donations to charities have continued to rise, despite the tough economic climate.
I do some work with Lions Clubs International in the British Isles – in fact, I became a member earlier this year. Not only has the Lions organisation helped others through fund-raising and charitable donations over the past century, but its members build social cohesion by organising local events and activities.
The same support for others can be found every Saturday morning with the hundreds of parkrun events that have expanded over the past 10 years into a global phenomenon. Similarly within organisations, thousands of employers support employee volunteering and other community projects.
I believe that we should spend time thinking that employers should do this and industry bodies should do that. We invest our time and money in such organisations and have the right to expect our relationship to be mutually supportive. Yes, we can take individual and collective action – but shouldn’t excuse people and institutions that have a negative impact on our levels of happiness and mental well-being.
It is also important to acknowledge that we may not be in control of our own mental health all of the time. It is good to see employers taking action to support well-being in the workplace, and anyone who is struggling should be encouraged to seek help. Knowing when we can resolve our own problems and when we need further support is critical.
Which leads me to revisit the happiness metrics idea. Andy Green may have a view on this from his work on social capital PR. As you’re probably aware, he has applied the concept of social capital to public relations in respect of connecting with communities and changing behaviours.
Social capital has been associated with happiness and improving productivity – hence perhaps we should consider social capital metrics as a happiness index – and an outcome measure of public relations/communications activities.
David SawyerExcellent response, Heather, really thought-provoking. To round up our conversation (this is a great idea of yours, I have done q+as before but never an email conversation where, unlike when chatting, you get a bit of time to reflect and give a considered if not exhaustive or polished response) I’ll try and take each of your paragraphs in turn.
I agree with everything in your first paragraph. Taking action is easier with the support of people. I have been influenced by thousands of people over the past six years and my book is a reflection of this: standing on the shoulders of giants as they say. And getting involved in supportive communities is the key to this.
I am a huge believer in karma, albeit it’s important I think to help others without expectation of anything in return. This is a philosophy I have embraced (can one embrace a philosophy?) over recent years, as anyone who know me well will tell you. And ref. inspiring others, your point about Stephen inspiring me and me inspiring others is apt, and one which I hadn’t thought of or made the link.
I also agree with everything you say about volunteering. Society, helping others, giving something back, is extremely important. Give time, and if you can’t give time, at least give money.
Ref. nobody cares about you, I’m not going to try and change your mind on this BUT please read this post, because I think it’s kind of fundamental to people’s passage through life. You can still hold this view and volunteer/take part in communities, but there’s no such thing as a selfless act.
David Nott is one of the UK’s leading heart surgeons, who volunteers for a month or two every year in some of the most diabolical war-torn places on earth, but he still admits that part of the attraction, why he does it, is “the buzz” – he feels a heightened sense of being alive.
Similarly, while I think professional standards are important and am a big supporter of my industry trade body, the CIPR, I kinda like the fact I get a high quality magazine every few months, receive access to the great resources on their website and can call on things like legal support when I need it. If it wasn’t for what I got out of them, I doubt I’d spend the £200+ every year. And for £200, I don’t expect them to have a direct impact on my everyday life: that’s for me to divine.
Ref. parkruns, that’s a great example of us both being right, albeit coming at it from different angles. Parkruns are the best thing that have ever happened to the running community in the UK. Every week up and down Britain and worldwide, at senior and junior parkruns, thousands of people are volunteering their time and effort. It’s a hugely supportive community, which I have got a great deal out of over the past six years. Without a collective ethos and our human yearning to help others (the yin of what we’re talking about) millions of UK people would be a lot less healthy and a lot less fulfilled.
But the yang is this, and I’ll draw on a personal example which’ll be familiar to anyone who takes their running even mildly seriously who’s reading this. When you get injured, as all runners do, that supportive community (apart from on Facebook) melts away a little, and the only thing that gets you back into that community, enjoying your running again, is you. Not your parkrun family, not your club, not your coach.
It’s about knowing your body, your mind, and putting the hours, weeks and months in to get back to your potential. And this is the thread that runs through my book, which can be best summed up in William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, when he says, in finishing: “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”
Mental health, I totally agree with you. Self-determination and taking control only goes so far. if you are suffering (through no fault of your own), seek professional help.
I’m going to round off with this surprising insight, on the core subject of our exchange, namely “what makes you happy?”.
The strongest predictor of how long you’ll live is your daily interaction with strangers. Not the quality of your close relationships (albeit that’s a close second), not whether you smoke, booze, exercise, or are fat or thin.
In a meta-analysis of 300,000-plus people, researchers at Brigham Young University found that the key to living a long life is social integration. Those chats with your neighbours, people at the school gate, the bloke serving you coffee, it’s those daily interactions on which we place no emphasis that make for a long and happy life. How much, and with what positivity you interact with people who don’t mean a great deal to you as you move through your day.
You have to take individual action to make this work but it amply demonstrates your point also that no person is an island and it’s only through our interactions with others that we will achieve great things and mental well-being, and so happiness.
- David Sawyer via LinkedIn or Twitter: @zudepr.
- Dr. Heather Yaxley via LinkedIn or Twitter: @Greenbanana.
