Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Jeremy Pepper posted recently about how letting off some steam in the office is a good way of relieving stress. I’d go one further and say that rather than just blurt out the odd expletive in the office, you should also drink on the job also…well with your colleagues outside of work also

Like Jermey says, PR is a stressful business. Worse yet, you can get quite caught up in the job and not build any meaningful relationships with your colleagues. Take where I work for example. There’s around 30 employees at Drury Communications and we’re split across to floors, effectively divided into what we call consumer and corporate teams (even though we do tech, public affairs, healthcare, etc communications also.) It means that you’re effectively working with a subset of the company the majority of the time and might not have much to do with other people working in a different sector.

You have to create an environment so that employees are able to engage with each other. By getting to know each other, you become aware of each other’s habits and their personal situation, thereby creating a much better working environment because you know what makes them tick and the pressures they have on them outside the office.

The situation in my workplace is interesting in that the age profile is gradually changing and we have a situation where a lot of senior staff have families and then there is a rowdy bunch of young up-and-comers like myself. It’s not feasible to say that we can all go for a pint every Friday night because some people have other responsibilities that they have to attend to.

We actively create opportunities though for staff to socialise together through a variety of initiatives such as our social committee, away days, celebrating new account wins, regularly all company meetings, etc.

The end result is that we have a much better working environment. The thing to note though is that the company has to proactively create opportunities for this environment to develop. It’s not enough to think that it will just come about naturally. People change over time and it’s vital for a company’s continuing success for its workforce to engage with each other.

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