I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again. PR is a people business. I suppose you could say that about a lot of types of business (er, HR for one), but imagine this.

Imagine a PR business where everyone’s miserable, where no-one has any enthusiasm for the clients’ businesses. Where talking to the media and all those other influencers is a monotonous chore. Where there’s little incentive or personal drive to develop and excel, or that incentive is unclear. Where inspiration is not woven into the fabric of the business, but an agenda item at board meetings.

Alright this is a bleak picture. And I’m sure we’ve all had pessimistic days when it seems like this stuff surrounds us.

But amidst the looming expectation of economic recovery and fears of further economic decline, PR agencies should remember that if their people don’t feel valued, the clock is ticking until the day they fall flat on their arses.

So it was with conversations about how we make feeling valued part of Speed’s DNA, rather than something that we have to constantly remind ourselves we need to do, ringing in my ears that a piece in the FT’s Managing Employees supplement caught my eye.

It talked of power sharing. Not in a Stormont way. Not in a scaremongering-over-the-prospect-of-a-hung-parliament way. But sharing the power, so that collectively the organisation is more powerful, and so more successful.

I can think of a few PR agency bosses who would wave their hands snottily and dismissively at such a suggestion. And others who would crap their pants.

They might talk about employee engagement, they might even counsel their clients on it. But when the door to the boardroom is closed, there are a handful of people who want to make all the decisions and retain the power. Because they want to retain control over who really makes the money.

An extract from the FT article states that ‘as businesses struggle to emerge from the recession, employees’ commitment will be vital’. Yes, damn true. But I’ve been thinking about quite how true it is in PR, given it’s all about people.

When Stephen Waddington and I started Rainier PR in 1998 we set out to involve everyone – everyone – in the business by giving them a commercial role and some budget responsibility, no matter how small. Over the years the importance of that waxed and waned in truth.

Yet given some of the really insightful, revealing and in many cases extremely smart conversations I’ve had with some of the people at Speed this week, it did make me think that this is, in principle, everybody’s company, regardless of legal ownership. And so if you’ve really got faith in the quality, drive and ideas of your people, is there a way you can put the power for developing the business into everyone’s hands?

There will of course need to be someone or a few people who ultimately make the biggest of the decisions, who the buck needs to stop with. Waddington and I had a clause in an ownership agreement some years ago that as we had 50/50 voting rights, ultimate arbitration would be a naked mud wrestling bout in Golden Square. It was inserted in our company Articles after a lawyer insisted that a limited company with two equal shareholders needed a mechanism for resolving disputes. It never happened, but I would’ve cheated and won.

Speed has delegated a lot of decisions about how we deliver for clients and who does the work to people responsible for running our teams and running our internal initiatives. But for me we could go further, by getting people to inspire, devise, run and improve things that really make a difference to the business and to everyone who works for it. And giving them the power to do so.

Some examples of where this could be applied:
1. How to motivate people brow-beaten by the recession (and who’d never been through one before)
2. Identifying the brands we’d really like to add to our client list and that we could make the most difference to
3. Heaping more real responsibility onto account executives (rather than just more work) so that they have more opportunity to prove themselves, develop faster and become enviable client ambassadors
4. Helping everyone to understand and get to grips with the changes happening in media and what they mean for the future of PR
5. Working out how we can really learn the most valuable and rewarding things from others internally

Yes a lot of this would ‘normally’ my job. Yes the buck may stop with me and my oppo. But would I be doing my job better if I put real responsibility for these sorts of things into the hands of colleagues, challenged them, gave them the power to make it work, and then got out of the way? Would it make people feel more satisfied in their jobs, more enthusiastic about work and new challenges?

Would a real commitment to commitment, proper employee engagement with real power, help to make the business better to work for and more profitable?

Quite probably.

So when do you want my job?