PR doesn’t have it easy at the moment. Gone are the days of frivolous boozing and twisting your journalist mate’s arm to run a spurious story for you. Well, mostly.

Today what we do is modernising fast because the media is changing. How we do things and why they matter is increasingly being sharpened up.

There’s enough going on with all that. But put all of those things to one side and it’s the R word that is dominating PR at the moment.

Recession is the overriding factor dominating how PR businesses are run, how they’re developed, what their aspirations are and how PR is bought at the moment.

There may be plenty of agencies that might say they’ve never been busier, but that’s typically because of conservative resourcing levels and short-term PR spending. And many may just be feasting on their own bravado. And anyway, nobody likes a show-off.

Others, most others, struggle to see far into the future. That doesn’t mean they’re in trouble, it just means that financial forecasting is difficult to call.

Most people running PR agencies have acknowledged that, like most sectors, the recession has brought unprecedented challenges. What few seem to have aired publicly, though, is the impact these tough times are having on their staff.

In the past few weeks I’ve talked to numerous recruiters, peers and clients about how agencies are treating their staff at the moment. I’m not getting at whether they’re being nice to them or nasty to them, though that would make a dirty little ditty no doubt.

What I’m getting at is whether agency management teams are responding wisely, transparently and fairly to helping their personnel through a recession.

According to the EMEA vice president of HR at technology giant Oracle, it’s time to stop talking about the recession and cutbacks, and be more positive about the future.

That’s certainly what many PR agencies and sector watchers seem to have adopted as their modus operandi over the past six months and yet the reality of working for many PR agencies at the moment points to a somewhat different tale.

Many of the job applicants Speed has seen through its doors in recent months talk about how many agency staffers are being asked to do jobs a level above their pay grade.

You always have to do this to an extent, but it’s an easy way for agencies to keep costs lower while retaining clients. It only works short-term though.

Others talk of their career development having stalled. Well, face facts people: a less buoyant market (and then some) means fewer opportunities and, probably, less rapid progression. Economic slowdown may well mean career slowdown. C’est la vie.

Here are a few helpful tips (not that I’m in a position to be the expert on this really, but I’ve started so I’ll finish) to senior management of PR agencies about how to manage their personnel in a recession:

1. Honesty: be transparent about your financial position, your business plan and your targets. Don’t scare people, but be frank. Many may scoff and this and tell me to get real, but if you’ve hired smart people they will know the gist of it anyway
2. Understanding: many, if not most, of the people working for PR agencies today will not have worked through a recession before. Sure there was the dot.com blip, but after a bruising the technology and digital people dusted themselves down. This recession is a different beast. People need to come to terms with it, and need guiding through that reality gently
3. Appreciation: people will be working harder. Work is tough to come by, there’s increased competition and a long queue of people wanting jobs. If you have loyal, hardworking, keen and intelligent people sweating it out every day, tell them why you’re enraptured with that kind of behaviour
4. Development: it may be more difficult to prove yourself because there’s less to get your teeth into. But opportunities have changed, not disappeared. Agencies still need to adopt a consistent and relentless approach to developing talent and seek to push people to improve themselves. Our business is changing so fast that no-one should have any excuse not to be learning lots of new and valuable things. If they hide behind excuses, it’s probably time for them to look for another type of job
5. Discomfort: given the above, it’s time to challenge people to learn new skills and push themselves, albeit against the backdrop of a painful recession. But what people learn and experience at times like this will be invaluable for the rest of their careers. We need to take people out of their comfort zones a little: give them things to do they’ve never done before, give them bigger and bolder responsibilities, get them to be braver in what they achieve for clients and for the agency.