What PR Pros Can Harness from an Unprecedented 2020 to Deal with an Unpredictable 2021: A Quasi-Retrospective

By Rachel S. Kovacs ? 2021

What Can Continue to Energize Us in Our Personal and Professional Lives:

1)    Gratitude: Be grateful for what we have and acknowledge it verbally and in writing. So many are less fortunate than us. Even those who appear to have “more” are not unscathed.

2)    Carpe Diem: Make each day count, professionally/personally; one knows not what lies ahead.

3)    Self-care: You cannot serve others unless you safeguard your own physical/mental health. Pursue those things that bring you joy and are do-able in our environment of constraints.

4)    Kindness: Do at least one small act every day-online, phone, however. Assess your strengths, engage others, and have a positive impact via generosity, pure and simple.

5)    Beauty and Humor: Seek them in everyday life; use them to heal and restore ourselves.

6)    Reflection: With most of our commuting time (and social calendars) slashed, many of us have poured more time into our online endeavors. Yet how many of us have reflected, re-examined, and regrouped concerning our goals, habits, workstyles, patterns of behavior that may or may not serve us well and should be changed? We need to make time for this, too.

7)    Take a Cue from Churchill: Keep Calm and Carry On

As Professionals:

1)    Cultivate empathy as a professional imperative. It is easier to do one-on-one or when there is a crisis, but given the pandemic’s scope, human toll, and economic fallout, now is the time to factor empathy into professional choices and company policy wherever possible.

2)    Build Strategic Partnerships: Innovative ways emerged in which disparate sectors of society, the medical community, and the economy came together for the “greater good.” PR pros, who interface among organizations, publics, media, and the environment, possess networking and research skills that pinpoint where and how to partner to accomplish goals.

3)    Corporate Social Responsibility is not obsolete, yet some organizations may need to switch from CSR initiatives in the past, or what they feel comfortable or think it is PC to offer, to more careful needs-based assessment of what they must offer, and to whom.

4)    Diversity, inclusion, and equity should be organic to PR agencies and departments. PR should audit performance in these areas, and results should drive normative hiring practices.

5)    They may be auxiliaries, but neither AI nor social media nor any technology will ever replace strategic relationship building as integral to excellent PR practice.