In my twenties when I was starting out in my career in PR, I was in the office five days a week come rain, shine, (minor) illness and whatever magnitude of hangover followed the night before, plus many evenings and weekends. That’s how I built my network, learnt on the job from my colleagues, gained skills and confidence and progressed.
I agree with the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s comments this week, that going back to the office is crucial to young people’s careers. In an interview with LinkedIn News Sunak credited the “mentors” he met when he started at work, adding: “I doubt I would have had those strong relationships if I was doing my internship or my first bit of my career over [Microsoft] Teams and Zoom.”
There’s no way I could have achieved what I have done working from home. Now I’m in my forties, running my own PR firm, the attitude among my employees is very different. It’s no longer the workplace, it’s the wokeplace.
My business partner and I employ about twenty members of staff, many aged under 30, and it’s a serious struggle to get them back to the office. We’re doing two days a week in the office, going up to three in September, which doesn’t feel unreasonable, but we can’t even get them to do that.
We are trying to recover from a very tough 18 months for hospitality PR, which we specialise in, but every other day someone in the team will say they have a cough or cold and they don’t feel comfortable coming in, even if they’ve tested negative. Or their boyfriend will have been pinged by the NHS app so they need to self-isolate together for the next ten days so they’ll see us in a fortnight. My partner and I had a bet that nobody would be pinged, test positive or have a cough or cold on the day of our recent company summer party, when we took them all to a country hotel. Predictably, we finally got a full house that day.
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We do have a lot of staff, not just the juniors, telling us that a day or two, here or there, working from home is really helpful to get their work done, and that makes sense. Yet recruiters are asking us: “Are you going to keep a hybrid model going for good? That’s what young people want.” So we’re under pressure to be accommodating. We are being held hostage to a certain extent — if we say no, they will all go and work elsewhere.
My partner and I worry that perhaps we’re dinosaurs and we’re not evolving quickly enough. Of course a work-life balance is important — I didn’t have any in my twenties, and I don’t think proving your worth by staying in the office until 10pm is a good idea either — but we are about working effectively, and I think that coming to the office is an essential part of people’s training and progress.
There is a whole generation of junior staff coming through whose progress is a lot slower because they’re not honing their skills, and that’s an issue. So much of PR is face to face, and it’s absolutely crucial to build your network and your contacts book — and nobody wants to meet for a coffee on Zoom. Junior staff also benefit from being around senior staff, hearing them on the phone and watching how they operate.
We have an HR department, we do six-month reviews as well as full annual reviews, and what we keep hearing from staff is: “I feel like I haven’t progressed in the way I think I should.” So there is an awareness from them that it’s an issue too. Everyone talks about schoolchildren’s progress being stunted because of Covid, but I think there is a generation of young professionals not developing either — in all jobs, but particularly in those that rely on interpersonal skills and contacts.
The absences and lack of physical manpower impact the business too. It was fine when everyone was working from home and many of our clients’ venues were closed, but now we have launches happening every week, and when team members say they can’t come in, that doesn’t look good to our clients.
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It’s not their fault necessarily, and we try to bear in mind that people have very different reactions to the pandemic. Some staff have stopped checking into clients’ venues because they don’t want to be constantly pinged by the NHS app, while others, some of whom have had Covid, are panicked by the very idea of mixing with other people at the office. Yet we are trying to run a business and have had to say: “Unless you have Covid, or feel ill, or have been pinged, you really do need to come back to work now.”
