"What I Wish My New Employee Knew"

The University of Georgia’s Karen Russell recently used her “Teaching PR” blog to suggest “A dozen things I wish PR pros would blog about.”

It is my intention to cover all 12 of these topics in the next few weeks, but on Karen’s list was this question: “What I Wish My New Employee Knew.”

Various PR bloggers have posted responses to this post, which has proved invaluable to me as a PR executive barely four months into his career.

Here are the posts that resonated most with me, collected here both so I can constantly remind myself of them as I progress and also to help out those others who are just beginning, or about to begin, their PR careers. And who knows - perhaps I'll even write a post on "What I wish my new employer knew":

From PR Squared:

• I wish my new employee knew that Quality Counts. A typo in an email might not seem like a big deal. But it doesn’t take long for the client to wonder if that sloppiness extends to the way the agency is cultivating their image to the outside world.
• I wish my new employee knew that when I say I’ve got an open-door policy, it means swing by anytime you have a question about anything. I don’t bite. It’s not hard for me to offer two cents: it’s my job. And I love my job.
• I wish my new employee knew that the beginning part of a career is usually a slog. It’s not all Social Media fun & games, sorry. To be effective & accountable strategists, we need databases, research, detailed reports. That’s how everybody starts out, even the rockstars.
• I wish my new employee knew that “eagerness is everything.” If you’re eager; if you’re leaning forward; motivated, I’ll lie on the train tracks for you. If you’ve got a dark cloud over your head, its shadow casts a pall over the entire office. That includes my office.
• I wish my new employee knew that it’s all fun and games til you complain about working til 8 o’clock every night. Barring a huge project or crisis, we don’t want you working that late; it doesn’t impress us, it makes us question your efficiency. Following a string of late nights in our SF office, we began to require written permission from a manager if someone felt the need to work past 6:30pm. People began to leave on time. Productivity soared. So did morale.
• I wish my new employee knew that it’s okay to screw-up sometimes. The sooner you tell your manager, the smaller the screw-up will look in retrospect. If you never fall down, how can you learn to pick yourself back up?

From Austin Edgignton commenting on the original post:

• I wish my new employee new their overall importance to the success of the business. Too often new employees are governed by 'mushroom management', i.e.kept in the dark and fed bullshit. This tactic obviates any words of delight you may have uttered about their presence. The best way to make new employees of any level feel empowered and wanted is to allow them to understand exactly how what they are doing will add to the bottom line. This takes more than a few words, rather a committment to communications...something often lost in the day-to-day rock and roll of working in the communications industry.

From Lauren Vargas commenting on the original post:

• I wish my new employee new that one must learn to temper eagerness with respect.

Stuart Bruce discusses his favourites here and Des Walsh talks about managing Gen Y employees here.

More to be added when (if) I find them!