One of the best part about my job is to be able to get an overview of the entire PR machinery. SCoRe is dedicated to the development of education and research in strategic communications. Which means that not only we are responsible for creating future communications managers but also for upskilling currently working professionals.
To fulfill the second objective mentioned above we recently launched ACE series of management development programmes designed for current communications professionals. To generate interest from the first programme in the series ‘ACE Writing’ I got a chance to meet and interact with the human resource managers of various Public Relations firms in Delhi NCR area.
One thing similar about all the HR teams/managers of PR firms that I interacted with was that they all were very different from each other. I have listed below a couple of points to state my observation:
Writing skills is the most important part of the public relations business. And when an HR manager sees a programme on writing skills for their employees you naturally expect them to show interest in it. During my interaction I noticed that while a few managers were over-excited about the launch of the programme, others were not so keen to even know more about it. The only reason the latter even heard what I had to say was because they knew that their respective CEO/head was interested, and they were bound to take action on it.
The managers of different companies displayed not the same kind of authority they had in the company. One may believe that the sense of authority may come from the fact that the company is a big global company or not. But I am afraid that was not the case. Surprisingly, I witnessed most positive attitude from the managers of the companies that are not global. I am now beginning to feel that ownership does not come from the size of the company but from the culture of an individual company, their heads and from personal attitude.
I don’t think that one can accurately judge how much an employee is empowered within an organisation based on one meeting. But one can definitely have a hint if the HR manager feels empowered enough to take important decisions or not. The presence of this trait was also very mixed among various managers. Some of them showed a lot greater sense of empowerment than others.
Public Relations as a profession runs in a very different way than any other. It is a people’s business and hence it is very important to have creative ways of engaging with the employees. If I were to give one suggestion to all the HR managers of PR firms, I would advise them to be socially savvy while engaging with their employees. Since PR people are naturally social people it maybe be a good idea for HR managers to engage with them on the social platform which may prove to be very effective.
– Radhika Nandwani
Radhika is the Corporate Communications Advisor at Dell’s Performance Analytics Group. She started her career in 2011, with one of the leading PR firms of India – MSLGROUP, specialising in technology brands. The campaigns executed by her while at MSL, have won several PR industry awards including SABRE and PR Week Asia. In her last role, she was the founding team member and the marketing communications manager at SCoRe. Radhika is an English graduate and holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication. She loves reading and is passionate about gender equality, food and Bollywood. She can be reached at @RadhikaNandwani on Twitter and here on LinkedIn
