Together PR and HR Build Business, Branding, and Culture

Gail Nelson, a PR executive at a New York-based digital workspace provider, recalls a telephone request she fielded from a human resources colleague as one of the more unusual
she's received in her professional life. "They asked me if I could get our company a story in The Boston Globe because they needed new recruits," says IntraLinks' VP of
marketing and communications. "They thought I could just dial up and land a front page story."

Nelson's Boston colleagues may demonstrate over-confidence in her abilities as a media maven, or they might be a bit thick about the mechanics of PR. But the brazen call could
reflect a general shift in the dynamics of corporate internal communications.

Following the days of high-flying tech stocks when corporate PR people could be found on the front lines of business as crusaders building brand awareness, many PR executives
today can be found working deep in the confines of their companies. Needed to maintain employee morale and productivity to weather what may be a coming recession, PR people are
becoming more involved with their colleagues in human resources.

Building Bridges

Nelson confirms that, errant phone calls aside, she does have a close working relationship with IntraLinks' HR department. Before the company grew large enough to hire an HR
director, she assumed many of the company's internal PR duties, starting an internal newsletter and helping to draft employee policies. Through these experiences, she gained
valuable insights and empathy into the vital HR communications role. Now that IntraLinks has an HR department, Nelson taps them for PR-related projects, like editing releases to
make sure the same messages are communicated externally and internally. In a reciprocal turn, Nelson also helped the HR department roll out a formal internal mentoring program for
new hires.

A dearth of new hires led PR Manager Sara Stutzenstein to sit down with HR workers last January and discuss inventive ways to recruit talent for their Atlanta-based Web-
hosting company, Interland. "We figured we could promote our company as an employer of choice," she says, to identify "groups who meet around Atlanta, like Linux enthusiasts and
Java developers, and offer up our office space to meet."

Stutzenstein figured that programmers, who tend to keep an ear to the ground regarding more lucrative employment, would jump at the chance to meet in a free space. So far,
Interland has hosted three meetings, which start with a five-minute presentation that she puts together for a company executive who plays host. The meetings provide a rare
opportunity for external PR staff to work alongside HR workers and help brand the company.

"[Visitors] get inside our environment," says Stutzenstein, "get absorbed and think it's a cool company."

Acquisition of Communication Skills

Andrew Carothers points to one group persistently overlooked as a point of contact for internal PR folks: HR departments in companies they are acquiring. Three years ago, the
senior PR specialist for AutoDesk, a San Rafael, CA-based software company, was organizing a Webcast in which executives were laying out business objectives for the employees of a
newly-acquired company, Canada-based Vision. Before the Webcast, Carothers talked to Vision's HR department to find out how to best assuage employees' fears about the acquisition.
"They wanted to know about their job status, their benefits, would they have to relocate," says Carothers. He also learned from HR that employees were especially edgy because of
their tumultuous company history. Vision had been bought and sold many times (eventually being purchased by telecom behemoth Worldcom) and many employees felt it lacked identity.
They had become a very small cog in a big wheel.

When it came time for the Webcast, AutoDesk's higher-ups did little at first to address the concerns of the acquired employees, instead veering off into vague language using
words like "synergy" and "market position." Carothers politely steered the executives to talk more frankly about the futures of the new employees, being mindful of what he learned
from Vision's HR department.

Several months after the Webcast, there was no mass exodus. In fact, when recruiters approached newly-acquired Vision employees at a conference, few jumped ship given the hard
sell. "The new employees had faith in our abilities, they trusted our communications efforts," says Carothers.

Walking, Not Crossing, the PR Line

Jim Shaffer, principal of The Shaffer Group and author of The Leadership Solution, cautions that teamwork between HR and PR is effective when it focuses on maintaining a
consistent brand identity, but can get dangerous when PR people step out of their designated roles and try to sell management on unproven ideas. Shaffer once got a call from the
CEO of a major company who was about to spend $350,000 to assemble all 15,000 of his employees in a convention center for a company "rally" to boost worker commitment. The CEO's
PR agency recommended it with little feedback from his staff. Such events, in Shaffer's opinion are little more than smoke and mirrors; they disconnect a company's outside
identity from the reality of its culture. The event never happened.

Rather, Shaffer stresses that the best PR is backed with unfailing commitment to honesty, and there's no better way to do this than by working with human resources counterparts
who have their fingers on the pulse of a company's staff. For example, when Levi Strauss was going through difficulties recently, its head of communications got a call from
Fortune magazine asking to do a profile of Chairman Bob Haas--the sort of "puff piece" that publicists dream about. In a move that some might say is professional hara-kiri, the
communications head declined the story, instead offering to open up the company only if the piece revealed their financial woes and how they were working in the guts of the
organization to turn things around. "This was the beauty of it," says Shaffer. "They had all their media, internal and external, communicating the same message. To do anything
else would have confused employees and diffused their productivity. "

(Gail Nelson, IntraLinks, 212/543-7761; Sara Stutzenstein, Interland, 404/720-3738; Andrew Carothers, AutoDesk, 415/537-9161; Jim Shaffer, The Shaffer Group, 410/268-7050)

Home-Schooling In-houseTalent

When PR Director Brenda Siler arrived on the job 18 months ago, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association's PR department had a less-than-stellar reputation among staff.
She turned that around by working with the HR director to create a "meeting facilitators" program. The non-profit covered the cost of training employees who wanted to learn the
basics of meeting moderation; a neutral voice, determining goals, and bringing opposing sides to the middle. Most in-house meetings now use in-house trained facilitators from
other departments. Siler says, "It's a great way to keep people from being stuck in one area of responsibility."

(Brenda Siler, American Speech-Language Hearing Association, 301/897-0104)