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10 steps to taking a guilt-free sick day

Being a PR pro can be extremely demanding. It’s hard to turn ourselves off, even when we’re on vacation. No wonder PR is consistently ranked as one of the most stressful jobs.

When you feel what could be a sore throat or exhaustion beginning to set in, it can be pretty scary. You tell yourself it will go away. You get to bed extra early (seven hours of actual sleep instead of the typical five) and you head in to work despite how you feel. Unfortunately, that sick feeling doesn’t go away and you begin to feel pretty horrible, but the show must go on and there’s absolutely no way you can take a sick day.

There is simply no time to be sick, but do yourself a favor and take a sick day.

I’ve been there. I’ve gone to work sick and I’ve seen coworkers do the same. We push through and ignore our bodies for the sake of the team, clients or our ego. After all, things would simply fall apart or you could even lose your job if you took a sick day, right?

Often, we take our laptops home and leave our phones on, all the while stressing out about the fact that we’re sick. That’s the closest to a sick day many of us ever get. There’s too much to do and not enough time to ever accomplish it all.

I’m here to tell you that it’s time to get over yourself so you can take care of yourself. Your team, boss and clients will understand. They all have been sick before, and most have other responsibilities that cause their schedules to shift last minute.

Everyone gets sick. It can’t always be prevented, and sometimes you just have to disconnect and sleep through it.

Removing the guilt

Full disclosure: I take sick days and I still struggle with guilt. Even though I don’t have a boss to report to, I still feel like I’m being less than my best. I’m getting better at resting and delegating, but there are still times I can prolong an illness because I simply keep working.

Here are the steps that have helped me take sick days and make the most of them to get back to work and full health as soon as possible.

Step 1: Taking a sick day in PR is all mental. You have to tell yourself you deserve it, are entitled to it and, gosh darn it, the world will not go up in flames if you take it.

Step 2: Designate a point of contact for while you’re out of office. Continue to run step 1 over in your head and begin to create a plan of attack. Should you leave your laptop with anyone?

Step 3: Set up an away message. List the point of contact while you are out of office, and let people who email you know you’ll get back to them promptly when you return. Depending on what your company culture prefers, you may just want to say you’re out of office instead of out sick.

Step 4: Leave your laptop at work. This is going to be hard. Even if your team can access your email and information remotely, you must leave your laptop, or else you will be tempted to check your email.

Step 5: When you get home, shut down your phone. I don’t mean to put it on silent or vibrate. You must completely shut your phone down while you sleep. The pull of technology is just too tempting when you’re already feeling guilty for not being in the office.

Step 6: Sleep and hydrate. Repeat until you’re feeling 100 percent better. You don’t want to risk prolonging your illness or making someone else sick. Sleep and repeat.

Step 7: Do not check your email.

Step 8: Seriously, don’t even think about checking your email.

Step 9: Remind yourself not to feel guilty. Your body needs rest. You deserve to be at your best. Your team deserves to have you at 100 percent and so do your clients. You will be a better asset to your employer if you are healthy, refreshed and assured that it is possible to actually unplug if needed.

Step 10: Thank your coworkers for covering for you and get back to rocking your job.

A note about bosses

If you’re successful in PR, you’re probably a type A personality and an overachiever. These qualities are wonderful when managed appropriately, but they can be detrimental to your health if you begin to feel anxious and guilty for taking time to care for yourself. Be careful to remind yourself that there is only one you, and you are the only one responsible for your health.

If you find that your work culture does not support the idea of taking time to recuperate when ill or you find your team, leadership or boss intentionally makes you feel guilty for taking sick time, it’s probably time to add “job search” to your to-do list. 

Do you struggle with taking sick days as a PR professional? Do you have any get-healthy quick tried and true tips? Share in the comments below.

[RELATED: Learn the best new strategies for improving PR results, influence and value.]

Kate Finley is the CEO of Belle Communications. A version of this article originally appeared on the firm’s blog.

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Why your employees need social-media training

“Facebook? I use that everyday. Who needs to be trained in it?”

Employee sentiment like that has become the stuff of nightmares for companies. Why? As businesses race head on into the social media arena, the modern workforce is still seriously ill-equipped to help unlock its enormous value.

An estimated three-quarters of consumers now say social media influences their buying decisions. Nearly 90 percent of US companies are using Twitter, Facebook and other networks—all jockeying for their share of the estimated $1.3 trillion in value that social media stands to unlock.

So as social media races ahead, formal training and education programs are lagging. A meager 12 percent of the 2,100 companies in a 2010 Harvard Business Review survey said they’re using social media effectively. More recent research by Capgemini and others show that confidence gaining only incrementally.

Reports of social media gaffes and blunders in the workplace are still prevalent. (Remember that US Airways social media disaster?) Meanwhile, the real price of the skills gap often goes unnoticed-billions of dollars in missed opportunities and lost revenue.

So, what’s behind the growing social media skills gap?

The clearest culprit is the breakneck proliferation of new platforms and features. Around a year ago, Snapchat was still a toy for teens to trade disappearing messaging; today it’s the latest way to reach young customers on their own turf. As platforms incorporate more sophisticated features, even the most plugged-in users are struggling to keep up.

At the same time, how social media is used in the workplace is fundamentally changing. Just a few years ago, it was the domain of specialized social media managers, the gatekeepers who owned a company’s public face on the leading platforms. In a short time, however, social media duties have been radically democratized and decentralized. The number of job descriptions on employment search sites mentioning social media skills is booming.

Since then, employees have been asked to use social media in numerous and unfamiliar ways. The standard marketing functions are just the tip of the iceberg. Social media tools are being used to streamline customer service, drive sales, improve HR processes, and build employee brand advocacy programs.

Meanwhile, platforms like Facebook at Work (in beta now and expected to roll out this year) and Slack (which boasts millions of users, from NASA to your corner coffee shop) are quickly changing how workers collaborate. By bringing social media messaging inside the office, these technologies are breaking down silos and boosting productivity. Social media is no longer a discrete thing that certain people do in certain jobs, but more of an integral component of work itself.

[WHITE PAPER: How to communicate with a millennial workforce]

That approach works only if employees are on board and up to speed. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University. Social media know-how isn’t something you pick up as a casual user, and it isn’t just older employees who are in the dark-millennial hires need training, too.

“Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” Ward says. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.’”

How do we fix the problem?

Bridging this social skills gap is no small task. In the long term, social media coursework is slowly being incorporated into university programs, and not just for students pursuing marketing and communications degrees. Here at Hootsuite, for instance, we’ve developed a social media syllabus that’s now being used by 30,000 students in more than 400 universities worldwide. Programs such as these offer a foundation of social media skills for the workplace and may one day be as commonplace as introductory college writing and computer skills classes.

What about employees struggling with the growing demands of online business? The good news is that companies are beginning to acknowledge social media literacy as a vital job skill (just as Internet and basic computer literacy once were) and are starting to offer on-the-job training programs.

Altimeter reports that almost half of the companies it surveyed plan to roll out some kind of internal social education program for employees, while overall spending on corporate training is on an upswing, rising 15 percent, to $70 billion, in the U.S. in a recent year.

The challenge, of course, is how to teach social media in such a mercurial environment. In the last year alone, for instance, we’ve seen the rise of “social video” and a whole new crop of one-to-one messaging apps, while Twitter has struggled to reinvent itself.

Few employees have time for in-depth courses or boot camps. Ultimately, the ideal training solution must be on demand and mobile-friendly. Currently, some of the best paid options are coming not from traditional educational sources, but from companies immersed in social and digital media, offering real lessons from the front lines. (Hootsuite’s own online course, Podium, is one free alternative.)

Ultimately, though, any investment in upgrading social media skills in the workplace is likely to be money well spent. A whopping 2 billion people (nearly a third of the planet’s population) are now on social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other networks aren’t going away. Doing business via social media has become business as usual. Social media budgets for businesses are expected to double in the next five years.

To avoid throwing good money after bad, organizations must ensure that their employees know how to use emerging social media technologies. Those that succeed in closing the social media skills gap will discover new ways to reach and retain customers, engage and recruit employees, and boost productivity. Those that fail will miss out on their chunk of a multitrillion-dollar pie and might not be around long enough to regret it.

A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

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5 ways the National Park Service reaches far-flung staffers

Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan Communications’ distance-learning portal Ragan Training. The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations and interactive courses.

You think you’ve got a dispersed workforce? Try dealing with thousands of sunburnt, Smokey Bear-hatted outdoor buffs scattered across some of the most remote wildernesses in the United States.

That’s what Suki Baz faced in launching the first-ever internal communications team at the National Park Service, many of whose 24,000 employees work in places without cellphone service.

So how does an internal communicator break through to folks out slogging through Alaska snowdrifts or leading sky-watch lectures in the Utah badlands? Smoke signals? Tom-toms? Carrier pigeons?

Turns out that Park Service employees aren’t so different from the rest of us. In the Ragan Training video, “Practical tips to connect and engage with a dispersed workforce,” Baz offers ideas for communicating with far-flung employees.

Baz, who joined the federal agency in 2012, formerly headed the strategic communications team at Booz Allen Hamilton and directed internal communications at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Health Affairs. So she has ample experience in working with large, scattered workforces.

Here are some of her tips:

1. Use technology to your advantage.

All those grizzly-rasslin’ mountain folk apparently do come down to the lowlands from time to time. Try rounding them up for big-event virtual town halls. Livestreaming allows employees to connect with leaders directly—and ask them questions face to face (so to speak).

“That can be a pretty powerful tool,” Baz says.

Another tool that works with the folks out in rattlesnake land is virtual collaboration technology. SharePoint, Google Documents and other Internet tools enable people to work together from remote locations. Make sure you teach them how to use the platform.

“Being able to write documents together in real time really has changed our culture and changed the way we do business at a pretty fundamental level,” Baz says.

2. Find your influencers.

That old codger who shook hands with Geronimo as a boy and can identify every bird and bug in the woods? He might just be the one everybody turns to for news. Same for the wise woman who lives in a hollow tree on your corporate campus and knows everything that’s going on in the organization.

Query your staff about who the five people are in the organization or their work group to whom employees turn for information, Baz says. If 30 people say it’s talkative old Dotty Czibulka in your halibut cannery or Ned Ganweiler on your sawmill green chain, you know you have identified an influencer.

“Reach out to that group, and get their input,” Baz says. “Ask if they can help you share information, and see how they take it. Some of them will be super overjoyed and happy to help you do that. Some say no. But at least you’ll have this group to help you get information out.”

When Baz knows something is coming up, she sends information to the influencer group. They’re good at distributing the information. Human resources and IT staffers, by the way, are good people to rope in.

3. Audit your channels.

You’ll hate this, but according to the rule of seven you must get your message out many times before it really reaches everyone. You’ll have to figure out what’s working, so audit your channels: email, newsletters, weekly messages—whatever. Be prepared to shake up or even eliminate anything that’s not working.

When Baz arrived at the National Park service, staffers were producing short videos that took a month apiece to complete. When Baz came in, she said, “This is not worth that time.”

“You don’t have to necessarily stick with what you’ve got,” she says.

4. Use employee groups.

Do you have an employee committee that plans the parties? They know how to get the word out, Baz says.

“Think of some of those groups that might be able to help get your message across, and leverage them,” Baz says. “Get to know them. Make them part of your influencer group.”

5. Use external channels.

Your employees are probably followers of your social media presence or may be looking at other online portals. Are you getting relevant news out on LinkedIn or Glassdoor?

“Use that content to your advantage, because it’s out there and it’s publicly available,” Baz says.

@ByWorking

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Girl Scouts taste success at the Oscars

Tips for making sure your email doesn't get tossed

I opened the email from my smartphone. Then, I closed it.

TL;DR.

If you’re not familiar with TL;DR, it means “too long; didn’t read.”

Most working professionals don’t have time for lengthy, information-packed emails. We’re inundated with information, most of which we access through a mobile device. Add to that our innate desire for self-preservation, which is a nice way of saying that even the kindest among us are thinking of our own needs first:

• Why should I care?
• What’s in it for me?
• How will this help me?

Within seconds of opening your message, readers decide whether to continue reading or file it under “TL;DR.”

Here are some quick steps to avoid the latter:

Ask: What’s my point?

The most effective emails have a big idea or central point. What big idea do you want to communicate? Think about the goal of your email. Do you want to incite action, influence thinking or simply inform? If you’re not clear about why you’re communicating, then your reader won’t be either.

OK, now get to it.

Once you know why you’re sending the email, don’t waste words getting to your point. Most people skim emails for important details so don’t force them to scroll or swipe to get what they need. After a brief, but polite, opening get to the meat of your message: Make your request, give key information, or communicate a deadline.

[Free download: 10 Ways to Get Employees to Open and Read Your Email]

Trim the fat.

Your “writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things [you] can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there,” says William Zinsser, author of  “On Writing Well.” Focus on your big idea, provide essential information to orient the reader, and then ruthlessly prune clutter. For example, choose short, one-syllable words over long words: “initial” (first), “attempt” (try), “assistance” (help), “in order to” (to), and the list goes on.

Think visually.

Words are important, but just as important is the physical presentation of your message. A succession of long, dense paragraphs discourages readers, whereas crisp, spacious paragraphs invite them to continue reading. Bulleted lists help, too. When it comes to sentences, similar rules apply: Think short. Be succinct.

Write actionable subject lines.

Nothing inspires inaction like a boring, generic subject line: Q4 report. Give people a reason to open your email by writing attention-getting subject lines that make it clear why your email is important. If you want the reader to take action, then say so in the subject line: Feedback requested on Q4 financials (attached). Also, keep subject lines brief, usually no more than 55 characters.

Consider your timing.

Send messages when you expect your reader will be available to read it. For most, that means emailing during normal work hours, though there may be instances when sending a very early email or late-night message is appropriate. Also, think about the timing of your message in relation to current events in your office or around the world. You want to be sensitive to external influences that can affect how your message is received.

Email is the default communication tool in most organizations. Your writing approach demonstrates your ability to think clearly and articulate your point. When your emails are too long, too complicated and too time-consuming, you risk being overlooked and unheard.

Use the above methods to avoid letting your next email slip into the TL;DR abyss.

A version of this article originally appeared on Inciteful Communications.

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It's your lucky day! Deadline extended for PR Daily's Media Relations Awards

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