PR, marcomms, recruitment and all the bits in between

Armageddon – part 3

OK, we promise to stop going on about this soon before you all get bored, but someone has to save the PR industry, so it might as well be us. This week we’re glad to see one of the sector’s great and good, Lord Bell, rallying to the cause in PR Week. As he puts it, “Share prices are low, meaning acquisitions are unlikely…But anyone who reads share prices as an indication of how well business is doing is a fool. They are a reflection of market sentiment rather than figures. The market has the jitters but PR is performing very well.” Thank you Lord Bell and thanks as well to WPP’s chief executive, who has gone on record as saying that, “I can’t recall a time when PR has been as strong. Now if we can just get John Humphries and the rest of the Today programme team to follow suit……

Futurework

Anyone who was busy with other stuff this week (like doing PR or marcomms work, for example) may have missed a new report on the future of work from the Chartered Management Institute. According to the report, which included the views of over 1000 senior executives, by 2018 we can expect virtual teams, multi-employment (job-hopping under another name) and the complete automation of routine tasks to be the norm. We can also expect to say goodbye to the concept of work/life balance and see work/life integration, where many people work from home juggling the demands of career with those of children and ageing relatives. All well and good so far, but then the Institute asks us to consider the altogether more wacky stuff. Among its sixteen ‘surprise scenarios’, which may or may not come true but are still worth preparing for, are the use of chips implanted into the brain to make workers more efficient, the rise of guild-based companies run by and for their employees (like John Lewis?) and young people rejecting ‘meaningless’ jobs (and the money that goes with them). Most worrying of all however is the idea of systems being run by intelligent software or robots in another guise. Which will of course make any fans of the ‘Terminator’ series very nervous about the future indeed.

007 Bloggers

Domestic security agency Shin Bet in Israel has been jumping on the internet blog band wagon by allowing its staff to create their own diarised versions of their day to day working life. Four employees have already begun their own blog in an attempt to win over hi-tech recruits.

In this particular circumstance the ‘bloggers’ remain anonymous and are referred to by letter only due to the fact agents are routinely involved in surveillance, interrogation and armed operations against Palestinian militants inside Israel. “At a family event someone asked where I worked and had trouble taking a hint” says A.

Despite these high powered, risky positions, staff continue to contribute to the World Wide Web of information about themselves and their duties even though, as one admits, “there are things I can’t even tell my husband”. Yet, this dramatic and potentially exciting career may not be as glamorous as we may be led to believe. One blogger who took the post as it allowed him to spend more time with his family and referred to only as H said “I didn’t get a siren put on my car and I have to sit in traffic jams”.

“This post will self-destruct in 10 seconds!”

Diversity

Colin Byrne of Weber Shandwick put the cat amongst the pigeons recently by questioning in a PR Week opinion piece why the PR sector still doesn’t reflect the diversity of British society. And if his analysis is right, the industry may be missing out on a significant pool of talent it can ill afford to ignore. As one of the experts in this field, Abbas Jaffer, head of diversity at investment bank Morgan Stanley, puts it, “No organisation can be complacent about the nature of top talent because the old perception of key people being white, middle class males is being swept away. Brains don’t have a colour and ability is distributed right across the ethnic spectrum.” As in the banking industry, part of the problem may be a failure in communicating to potential new entrants right across the board that PR can provide realistic career options for anyone with talent and application and is not the closed shop it may at first appear. And if a sector that earns its way by communicating can’t do that effectively, you’re left wondering just which one can.

Armageddon – part 2

Avid readers will remember our rant about how the media seems to be delighting in the prospect of economic downturn, despite the fact that many sectors (including PR) seem to be holding up quite nicely so far. A few weeks ago the FT carried a lovely big headline telling us that no less a luminary than Mervyn King thinks we’re all going to hell in a hand basket (they didn’t actually use that term, but you get the picture). The accompanying newspiece featured the words ‘bleak’ and ‘pessimistic’ repeatedly as well as the uplifting ‘economy likely to come close to a halt’ before admitting in paragraph nine that Mr King’s was not actually predicting a recession after all. This compares quite nicely with a feature in the US magazine, Advertising Age, headlined ‘PR had a good run but agencies expect growth to slow’. The writer flirts with the idea of a negative story but you can immediately tell that his heart just isn’t in it and before you know it he’s flagging up that, despite the US being the home of the credit crunch, the PR industry there might even grow a bit faster this year than it did in 2007 and follows up with a string of upbeat quotes. Here at Hanson, we’d be the last to stick our heads in the sand if things really are turning down dramatically, but we can’t help feeling that the best way to get a recession is to talk yourself into one and vice-versa.

Disadvantages

So they told you that you didn’t get that last promotion because of your account management skills/ your specific experience/a stronger candidate, etc, etc. But could there be more to it than that? A study by the University of Florida suggests that tall people are more successful in life than their shorter counterparts with every extra inch in height being worth £400 in annual salary. Research by Yale university found that 43% of employers and 53% of co-workers discriminate against the overweight, while yet another study came up with the theory that people with the initials ‘A’ and ‘B’ do better than those with the initials ‘C’ and ‘D’ (we assume that if you are called Yvonne Zebadiah you might as well just give up). And if you are a male who is losing his hair, you are also in trouble. A German study found that bald men are only half as likely to get a job as those with luxuriant locks because they are seen as ‘less dynamic’.

Levelling the playing field

Although the PR industry is one of the few areas of the British economy where female directors are actually quite thick on the ground, it seems their counterparts in other industries are dwindling in number. The latest analysis from Cranfield business school of the FTSE 100 has found that the number of women holding executive directorships dropped in 2007 to 13% of the total whilst only 3% of chief executives were female. The Fortune 500 in the USA has only a slightly better record - there some 15% of directors are women. Despite the fact that women now account for 60% of all university graduates in the EU and USA, it’s a sorry fact that relatively few are making it to the boardroom or the partnership table. In Norway, the government decided to tackled this in a radical way by mandating that all pubic companies would need to have at least 40% of their directorships in female hands by the beginning of 2008 or face heavy fines. So has it worked? The short answer seems to be, not really. Given the lack of women already working at senior management level, what are now known in Norwegian business circles as ‘golden skirts’ have ended up with as many as 30 directorships each, leaving us wondering just how effective they can really be in each role. Nice try Norway, but more long-term planning seems to be vital if this solution to a male dominated workplace is ever going to work.

The ‘Tiswas generation’

Remember watching Tiswas as a kid on Saturday mornings? Then you’re probably part of what has been named the ‘Tiswas generation’, those brought up on the TV show but also standing for ‘Thirty-Somethings Without Any Savings’.

This generation of under-35s apparently need to be earning at least £320,000 a year if they want to retire at 63 on their current average salary of £27,700. The other alternative? Spend your retirement on £271 a month or don’t retire until you’re 76.

Once we’ve worked out what the Budget has really meant, we may have even less disposable income to stash away for our retirement years. Maybe we should get working on securing that promotion – or think about a career as an investment banker.

Emails – useful tool or office timewaster?

So apparently, worldwide, we send 196 billion emails a day and the average employee spends up to 2 hours a day dealing with emails. Some firms are also introducing ‘no email days’ to encourage employees to phone each other or talk face to face. OK so maybe we get a bit lazy sending emails across the office asking who wants coffee, and sometimes picking up the phone can be a much more efficient way of doing things. But is it really a “broken business tool”? How else would we send huge documents in the click of a button, communicate with a wide range of people all at once and keep copies of all our conversations? A few extra emails and a bit of amusing spam is a small price to pay for a tool that makes business life a whole lot easier.

Perks under fire

A while back, our old friends at HMRC were cracking down on the self-employed. This time it’s the turn of those on the corporate payroll. Not content with taxing the company car towards the brink of extinction, the government is now considering proposals to tax workers’ parking spaces as a ‘benefit in kind’ (the chair you are currently sitting on will very likely follow before to long), as well as taxing employers for having the effrontery to provide car parking facilities. Of course parking a car in many of our major cities has long been a major challenge, resulting in many employers paying for taxis home when their staff have to work late. Now new guidelines from the Revenue and Customs have shifted this particular perk into the ‘benefit in kind’ box, so expect your tax bill to rise unless you can prove real necessity – and heavy bags, the horrors of much late night public transport or simply being worn out will not count.