Show Notes: 

Read A Seat at the Table to learn all of our findings about school comms. 

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Episode Transcript

Eileen Beard: Welcome to the SchoolCEO Podcast. I’m your host, Eileen Beard. In the last episode, I shared some findings from our original research project, “A Seat at the Table,” which we designed to better understand who school communicators are and how they work. 

Today, I want to share our most troubling findings with you. Certain working conditions are causing many comms pros to feel burnout. Here’s Brittany Keil, the lead research author, reading some of the results: 

Excerpt from A Seat at the Table: https://www.schoolceo.com/a/a-seat-at-the-table-research-on-the-relationship-between-superintendents-and-school-communicators/

Brittany Keil: We also wanted to understand how executive access impacted comms pros’ work priorities, as well as the relative proactivity or reactivity of their work. 

In their open responses, many participants lamented that too much of their time was spent either managing social media or “putting out fires,” and that they wished they had more time for strategic, long-term planning. “I wish I had more time to do strategy!” one respondent said. “As a one-man band, that is often an item that gets pushed to the end of the list even though I am most passionate about it.” Another respondent explained: “Social media takes much more time to create and manage than I believe it is worth in 2024. Gathering all the pieces (researching content, getting photos, checking names, cross-checking image releases, learning and dealing with the latest Facebook/Instagram update) takes as much time as creating a quality email. I believe other forms of communication and marketing are currently more valuable.”

Open responses also revealed that social media wasn’t the only tedious task that ate into comms directors’ time. In many districts, a proliferation of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests has fallen to communications personnel, to the detriment of their other tasks. “I am currently spending most of my time split between a bond referendum and FOIA requests,” one respondent explained. “The bond falls into the strategic planning category, but I wish I could spend less time on FOIA requests. It has taken over my job, and I am not able to be in the schools as much telling the stories of the amazing things happening in our classrooms.” 

It’s no surprise, then, that over half (54%) of the respondents disagreed with the statement, “You spend the majority of your time focusing on what you consider to be the most important elements of your role.”

Many of our respondents described spending far more time on day-to-day reactive tasks than on proactive, strategic tasks. As one participant put it, “I wish I could spend more time being creative and overseeing fun video projects to help tell our story. Instead, I’m constantly dealing with students or staff getting in some sort of legal trouble, legislative affairs trying to destroy public education, parents going to the media about stupid things that should be handled internally, etc.”

How does this impact burnout? In a post-pandemic world, workplaces are rife with burnout. This isn’t unique to schools, of course, but if your communications team is experiencing burnout, their potential will be limited. 

To understand how burnout impacts school communications professionals, we provided our respondents with the following prompt: 

According to the National Institute of Health, burnout is “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” Based on the above definition, how frequently do you feel “burned out”?

Participants were asked to rank themselves on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being “always burned out.” An alarming 77% responded that they were at least “sometimes” burned out, with 37% answering that they were “always” or “often” burned out. 

Burnout can be especially detrimental given the isolation inherent to being on a team of one. When asked about their plans to continue in the field for the next five years, 40% of respondents said that they did not plan to remain in school communications. Because of the isolation of the position, some school communicators felt that they were overlooked when it came to the broader conversation around burnout in education. One participant explained: “We hear a lot about teacher burnout, but I also know many school communicators who are burned out. The constant barrage of criticism, unkind comments on social media, and the ever-increasing demands of the job in a 24/7 news cycle all contribute to some school communications professionals leaving. I believe that school districts must address staff members’ mental health issues in a systematic way.”

But despite their workload and burnout, many communications professionals told us that they loved their jobs, especially when they could regularly connect with other school communicators about their ever-changing field. 

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Eileen Beard: I know that’s a lot to take in, but we have some recommendations for school comms pros who do feel overwhelmed. One, seek out others in your field for support. We all need a good gripe session sometimes and no one gets you better than the you at a different district. Second, ask your superintendent for a seat at the table. Having a seat at the table means being able to focus on more proactive work and generally getting less burned out. Third, build storytelling systems. When it comes to district communications, you’re the professional—and sometimes, being the professional means coaching others. One person alone can’t hold up the story of an entire district, so you need to recruit others to join a narrative that aligns to the brand that you and your superintendent have designed. On the next episode, we’ll tell you about one of those storytelling systems that many districts are already using to lighten the load on comms pros while multiplying the number of stories they tell. Stay tuned.