I work in my company’s internal PR division and one of our tasks is to prepare the daily newsletter that is sent to all of our employees. The slightest mistake this month is becoming reason for public, vocal complaints made by our chief, citing risks to our division’s reputation. It’s like working in a nuclear power plant’s control room and having a potential chernobyl incident every single day.
Also I feel that our area lacks some sort of manual or white book. Having to remember by heart several rules and exceptions is just too stressing. It’s like playing those platform games where out of nowhere a hole opens after you dodge some obstacle and you lose anyway.
Correct me if I’m just being cranky or lazy.
Management loves to say everything is critical, but never seems to realize that when everything takes priority, nothing does.
Daily employee newsletter 🤢
I don’t even read the monthly ones my company puts out, daily must be soulcrushingly tedious?
i used to have to do something like this and the soulcrushing happens when you get yelled at by several people because a sentence is 61 characters instead of 60 or a logo isn’t the exact shade of a gold.
This. Everyone knows better than you how to do your job.
The target audience for newsletters and dashboards and analytics is not people actually doing work, it’s people who talk about other people’s work.
It’'s a state-owned company so everything is really by the book. They’re obsessive about unofficial information circulating around. And another thing that bothers me a lot is that most managers see it as a way to promote themselves: something like saying to the board of directors “look at me, I’m doing stuff, can you give me a higher managerial position?”
Ladder climbers and empire builders are a cancer
even without a newsletter this is the case. Middle managers mostly are about making whatever their team or section or division or whatever is absolutely critical to the company.
That’s intentional, they’re making you feel insecure so you work harder.
My new boss is one of those everything is urgent types. He texted me before my first day asking for subcontractor contacts. I’m probably not staying long at this company.
Internal PR? And you have an entire division for that?
understaffed, but it still exists.
It’s important to remember that division of labor is a thing. You are an employee with a job description, hopefully, and generally, there are people who are supposed to do the work, and other people evaluate, sort, distribute the work that needs to be done. That would be “managing”.
If everything is critical all the time, every day, your manager is not doing their job.
That doesn’t mean it’s something you can fix, but it’s not your fault either. Being bad at their job isn’t a particular bad failing. It’s a major inconvenience for you, but he’s not kicking cats and dogs either. I hope.
The internet doesn’t know you. I don’t know if you’re cranky or lazy, it’s also possible that your workload is reasonable but you don’t see it that way. No way to tell.
Good managing behavior includes: praising people for good work in public and also defending the people they’re responsible for if the fault is due to process, not their personal failure.
Also, if I may, an internal PR division sounds really really useless, so I’m not surprised someone is desperate to not show any signs of failure, because that’s a position that’s just asking to be “restructured”. “Internal public relations”? What?
mostly our job is to inform our employees about what’s being done within the company, mostly about projects and some internal processes which needs some degree of formality, invitations for internal events and so on. it has a role in keeping internal culture and morale too. but i believe it’s something that, with the likes of “viva engage” coming, will probably wither away. that’s another thing i’m worrying about, but for another post.
Seems like a business processes is at fault here. If something minor like an error in a daily internal newsletter is causing an exec to freak out perhaps some oversight is needed.
Then it problem is no longer yours as someone else with authority approved it.
You can also be the change you want to see, draft a manual or a “Don’t post stuff about X if Y is mentioned” documents. Unload it from your head.
already started a doc in here, “unwritten rules of the internal pr division, written”.
Surely there is not actually enough going on that you need a daily newsletter, that’s a ton of work on a short timeline.
Your boss is an asshole
I would use LLMs for this tbh. The rules and exceptions can be fed in as project instructions
