Can PR executives reverse the rain?

So, tell me where you are. 

Tell me how you feel. 

Tell me what you need, 

And let it all just rain on me. 

The lyrics of the famous Kane song strike me as relevant as we enter our second ‘World Mental Health Awareness Day’ during the continually complex days that we will always remember as the ‘Covid Times’. Will we look back and wonder if it was all a dream? Will we ever be able to muster up the weight of the feelings of anxiety, entrapment, and painful lack of freedom, in the future?  

For some, their lives are returning to some semblance of normality but for millions their lives remain under a rain cloud of never-ending days alone, locked into their homes and locked out of the life they once accepted as normal.  Are our agencies, and our innately powerful relationships with the media, able to offer, as Kane does, the opportunity for team members to continue to tell their leaders what they need to sustain ‘life abnormal’? To perform at their peak and to truly feel heard by the organisations they commit their craft to?  

Are we doing enough to encourage organisations to embrace the flexibility and freedom that their teams need to make this disrupted life a consistently healthy one? For far too many people the answers to both these questions remain to be ‘no’ and we are paying the price in our emotional health as well as our performance. 

We’ve had 30 years of declining empathy in the world and the impact of this is far-reaching, impacting increased levels of anxiety, depression, burn out and deepening global loneliness endemic. Agency leaders today are responsible for meeting these issues head-on and hearing the stories and realities of their teams. We now have over 40 percent of people living alone, which didn’t mean so much when most of our days were absorbed by media events and office working, but today means that most of us spend, most of, our time alone. As human beings, we are quite simply not meant to be alone.  We thrive when we’re together. And this explains much of the fallout of mental health in our industry over the last two years. 

In a recent report on mental health and wellbeing in Europe survey conducted by AXA, 64% of respondents said their stress levels had increased since before the pandemic, while 81% said that they had an ongoing state of mental stress. Further research from O.C. Tanner 2021 Global Culture Report, which surveyed 40,000 employees and leaders worldwide, shows that Covid has driven burnout rates up by 81%. The connection between our mass aloneness partnered with financial hardship, a lack of social contact, and a potentially fatal virus has led us to see the highest emotional stress levels in many years. We are living in tenuous times. We are living in a never-ending rain of emotional risk and our industry is not moving fast enough to make this manageable and sustainable for our people. 

As our collective understanding of this rises, however, we do see widespread media recognition that humans need to be more connected, more aligned and more understood than we have been in of the last three decades. This is a positive step and a survival imperative.  As PR professionals we have the keys to elevate this conversation further. To ensure this discussion doesn’t slow down but instead builds up to true change. Organisational empathy may not be easy to master, and addressing these issues demands a whole new leadership and cultural approach, but it is the most powerful expression of our shared humanity in these times.  

To be frank, we don’t have a choice if we want to keep our staff and our businesses growing. Our empathy for others, as the storm continues, may just be the sharpest tool we have for recovery, in a world where the rain of complex emotional realities continues to pour. Reverse the rain, or slow it down, but ignore it at your peril.  

For more information or to talk to Mimi Nicklin visit – www.empathyeverywhere.co and www.findfreedm.com