How to tackle the ingrained ageism in PR

Even if the Chancellor’s policy in this area has been questioned, his intention struck a chord with me as someone who, excited though I am with my new role, departed the big PR agency scene with a real frustration at how us older workers fare in the industry.

PR and comms firms ought to be a place where a range of skills and experiences are brought together in order to provide the best teams for a client or project.

Unfortunately, they increasingly feel like a young person’s environment, and frankly have become echo chambers as a result. While many agencies are doing good work on various dimensions of diversity and inclusion, I’ve increasingly felt like an outsider since entering the 50-plus bracket, almost as if my presence is likely to unsettle younger staff or kill the vibe.

This wasn’t how twentysomething staff made me feel, incidentally. It came from the way these firms operated.

One of the issues is the way teams were encouraged to socialise, let their hair down, and build those relationships and friendships which were so important to agency life. All too often, myself and other older staff found these events alienating, not least when the focus was on drinking prowess, something which women in menopause are particularly unlikely to possess.

More inclusive activities at socials is certainly a must-do, but there is also something more essential. Job descriptions in PR, especially for mid- and senior-level roles, require people to do it all; manage teams, manage finances, manage clients, lead new business, and so on.

These roles are draining. It’s not that older people don’t have the energy to do them, but for many of us the appetite for juggling several different balls is gone. To keep the fire burning, the work itself increasingly needs to relate to our passions and motivations, and older staff need to be allowed to ditch the things that we’ve spent decades doing without loving. If you can rewrite job descriptions to empower older colleagues to focus on the things you already know that they do well, you will reap the rewards.

That’s not to say that we no longer want to develop, by the way. An issue I’ve faced in recent years is people being confused about what sort of line management and appraisal process to provide, or in one case refusing to be my line manager seemingly out of feeling intimidated by my relatively advanced years. We don’t want to be side-lined and left to plod along and do our own thing, this just makes us feel unwelcome.

Another thing that needs to change is the way that some senior leaders and CEOs appear to feel threatened by older staff. Don’t assume that older staff feel embittered at the fact that they’re not the CEO; if they had aspirations to make it to the very top, they’d probably have followed a different career path.

A final thing, and I can barely believe this needs to be said, but don’t assume your older staff are digitally incompetent or disinterested. This is a horrible stereotype which benefits nobody and only adds to the aforementioned feeling of isolation.

The odd thing about the culture of ageism I have observed in the PR industry is that we all know the particular benefits that older staff often bring, such as the experience and wisdom of years, and the ability to reassure a client in a way that a younger voice might not.

This makes it even more of a shame that so many PR firms are failing to capitalise on the skills which older professionals offer, which means we’re not providing clients with as good a quality of services as we ought. Even if flexible working and hybrid staffing models are making some inroads on this front, the industry is at serious risk of making its existing talent challenges even worse.

Susan Smith is the chief operating officer of Alder, which is part of the Crisis Communications Network Europe.

Image by fizkes on iStock