Managing Time and People

The saying goes that time flies when you’re having fun, but in my experience it seems to fly by even more quickly when you’re under pressure to complete an important task. Managing time and people is a really important skill for PR practitioners and is also very applicable to this project. 

Tench and Yeomans say that ‘Time is a finite commodity and the life of the PR practitioner is notoriously busy. Furthermore, PR often involves the cooperation of others, and getting them to observe deadlines requires firmness and tact’. This demonstrates how the management of both time and people tie in together and a successful manager of these elements would have the ability to make projects run smoothly. 

We didn’t have a clear leader in our group, we took on the tasks together and shared ideas and the workload, however Rhi did tend to have the final cut and smooth out the kinks. Typical completer-finisher! This strategy worked really well for our group, we managed our time well, spending full days on the brief and pitch rather than many separate meetings. 

In-house PR tends to be managed by one person if not a small team, and the management will make PR decisions including the use of outside agencies. Alternatively PR Agencies there will still be a hierarchy of management however different accounts will have different account managers. Management styles differ massively dependent on the culture of the company. Smythe et al cited in Harrison, suggest that there are 5 different management styles, instructional, informative, consultative, involving and participative. Instructional style tends to be a style undertook by authoritative bodies such as the police or military, this is because instructions need to be clear and understood. We undertook a more participative style in our group work as everybody’s ideas were important. Management style in the PR industry does typically take on a more involving style as the work the industry carries out thrives on creativity and ideas. 

Once we knew that we were all able to manage ourselves in terms of our group work, we needed to look at our time management, pencilling in our meetings to when everybody had a space in their diaries. Finding a time where 4 different people with different responsibilities can meet is a very difficult task, we had to factor in a number of aspects, such as part-time jobs, other lectures and seminars, people who went home at weekends etc. This is one of the most difficult aspects of group work at university. Although time management is obviously an important skill for a career in PR, it can be considered that in the ‘real world’ finding meeting times will be easier than at university because everybody will typically convene at the same office everyday even if it is just a quick 5 minute meeting that everybody is available for. Despite my complaining about finding times to meet, we managed absolutely fine as we were all dedicated to complete this project to the best of our abilities.