How to Develop PR Skills

Improving staff communication and customer care, dealing with crises, and organizing events and campaigns are key PR skills. Learn how to become an accomplished PR practitioner.

Communicating with Staff

Good PR starts at home. Committed and helpful staffs create a good, image, so regard employees not just as a workforce, but as a principal target audience. Nurture staff commitment through effective employee communication involving genuine dialogue.

Develop PR Skills

Keeping Staff Informed

Use PR techniques to help you achieve a genuine and meaningful relationship with staff. Employees need to know what is going on in their organization and should be kept informed at an early stage of developments that will affect them. Tell employees about new staff, promotions, job opportunities, new products and services, high-profile marketing activity, financial results, and future plans. Effective internal communication is in everyone’s interests.

Creating Real Dialogue

Recognize the benefits of sharing information and create a genuine, open, two-way communication channel between staff and management. Staffs are sometimes sceptical of internal communication because it is often used merely to deliver bad news, such as redundancies. Distrust is understandable if staff receive nothing but company propaganda. Staffs want to hear all news, good and bad, presented in a straightforward and honest way. Ensure that the information flow is two-way. All

team members can provide valuable insights. Encourage them to feed ideas to managers.

Undertaking a Communications Audit

You may be surprised at how staff regard the effectiveness or otherwise of your organization’s internal communication. Find out what your staffs think. Where are the information blockages? Are you telling staff too much or too little? Do they understand and believe the corporate messages? Demonstrate to staff that their views are important. Send out a questionnaire, phrasing questions so that you can identify where the problems are. Act on the findings. Draw up an action plan, share it with staff, then implement it.