Show Notes: 

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

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Episode Transcript

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.” From it, we found that a lot of comms pros are experiencing burnout at record levels. And while I promised to tell you about storytelling systems that can help comms avoid burnout, it didn’t feel right to me to move on just yet. Because the SchoolCEO team knows how hard you work to champion education. So let’s talk about some additional ways you can restore a little work/life balance to avoid burnout. 

1. The first thing is to control the things you can and let go of the things you can’t. For instance, you can’t control emergency weather or other people’s decisions. You can control how kind you are to the people around you.
2. In that vein, set time limits on answering non-emergency calls or texts and share these boundaries with your coworkers. That is something you can control.And if you need to write an email while it’s still top of mind, but it’s 8PM at night, go ahead and write it but schedule it to send the following morning when you’ll actually be available to handle a reply.
3. Build a strong brand. It’s much easier to draft clear, consistent communication with your stakeholders when you have clear guidelines: make sure all visual aspects, values and messaging priorities are consistent. And, the stronger your brand, the more trust your community should have in your schools… which for you means spending less time with reactive work and more time with proactive work like strategic planning. 
4. Reconsider social media. It’s clear from our research that many school comms pros spend much more time managing social media than they’d like and they don’t consider it to be particularly important to their work. If that sounds like you, ask why you’re doing it? Just because? Look at the data. Talk to your parents. At the very least, consider if you should pare down the number of platforms you use. 

But avoiding burnout isn’t all on you. There are lots of steps leadership can take to help you as well. As I said in the last episode, comms pros deserve a seat at the decisionmaking table. Supers, if you haven’t already, invite them to the table. I also mentioned the difficult relationship comms sometimes have with principals and building staff. Supers, you can help bridge that gap. Part of your work is to create an environment where people value and trust each other. Last up, supers, you can help your comms people achieve a healthier work/life balance by modeling healthy behaviors yourself. You can’t encourage your employees to set realistic boundaries if you routinely work outside of normal business hours. But if you set clear boundaries for yourself, they’ll know it’s okay to do the same. And remember, their boundaries apply to you, too. When you send them a text at 9PM for a non-emergency, you might be crossing them. The rules have to apply to you, too. 

Thank you all for joining me. See you next time.