The emotional impact of working in communications

My research is uncovering the emotional weight that senior communications work carries. It's a cost that is rarely named, but one I have come to know from the inside.

I’m investigating the conditions under which public relations earns recognition as a strategic management function and how to close the gap. My data analysis is almost complete. This week, it stopped being a heap of transcripts and turned into an argument of my own.

Each interview paired a senior communicator in a high-performing function with the manager they report to, often the chief executive or the chair.

The design is deliberate. Recognition can’t really be self-reported. A practitioner who tells me their function is strategic is offering an opinion. The same claim, confirmed by their chief executive, is evidence. Often, the most revealing data is where the two accounts diverge.

The clearest finding is that access to management matters more than a management seat. Strategic communicators almost always have direct, sometimes informal, access to the chief executive and the chair, whether or not they sit on the board. Management prizes judgment over craft. And underneath everything, the standing of the function rests on relationships and trust more than on any structure, qualification, or accreditation.

The realisation that I’ve become part of the story

One of the most significant findings of my work is that senior communicators carry an emotional labour that the literature has only recently started to acknowledge. They describe the isolation of the role, the ethical weight of the decisions they are party to, and a quiet worry about whether the work they do counts.

I recognise it because I have been running on a version of it. The doubt that arises at five in the morning about whether the work is good enough and when I’ll get it done. Naming that labour in other people’s working lives while carrying it in my own has given the research an edge I didn’t expect. There is a joke buried here somewhere.

Dinner last week with Dr Jon White

Last week I had dinner with Dr Jon White, one of the contributors to the original Excellence study started by Dr James Grunig in the 1980s. It’s the research project from which much of the theory I am working with descends. He’s also the reason I am doing any of this. He first challenged me to take on the work in 2013 and has supported it ever since. Thanks, Jon.

I’ve written about this before, but over dinner I sat across the table from part of the lineage of my own thesis, and from the man who set me on it more than a decade ago. The work feels solitary at half past five in the morning, and yet every bit of it is inherited, and one day it will be handed on to whoever comes next.

Wanting it done

For the first time, I can see the end. The data analysis goes through a formal review next and into the findings chapter, where the qualitative work meets the survey of 500 in-house practitioners for a second time. Then the discussion and conclusion. Somewhere in the months ahead, there is a thesis to submit and then a viva.

I want it done. This is my fifth year of study, and sixth year since I wrote the original proposal. I have wanted it done for a long time, but I am not in a hurry for it to end.

The early starts and the stolen hours have become part of my life, and I am in no rush to give them back. So I will keep getting up at half past five, and enjoy the home straight while it lasts.

Sometimes you just need to put in the hours to get the job done.

Further reading

This essay was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by more than 5,000 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field.