InsidEPR

Engage PR wins “Best Places to Work in the Bay Area” award… again

By Chelsea Irwin

While the Engage PR softball team might be 0 for 175, when it comes to winning awards we’re doing great. Engage PR recently received a “Best Places to Work in the Bay Area” award for the fourth time in five years. If you’re wondering what happened that one year we didn’t win, they cancelled lunch time and forced us to wear uniforms. That’s a joke. We actually weren’t eligible one year.

So it’s no surprise that everyone wants to work at Engage PR. I can’t decide if this is the result of the amazing work schedule, the company culture, or just because we have so much fun? I’m leaning towards the work schedule (we get off at 2:00 p.m. on Fridays).

I also keep hearing that Engage PR offers a “something healthy” allowance to each employee. I haven’t actually done anything healthy in about 10 years so I’ll take their word for it. Some of the perks I do capitalize on include the commuter relief stipends, monthly “kudos” awards and a comprehensive benefits package that includes a 401k plan and medical, dental, and vision coverage.

The 401k plan is especially important for me because I plan on retiring in the next year, or at least before I hit 30. I’ll let you know how early retirement works out for me. If all else fails, I have a great job to fall back on.

Alpha Dog?

By Molly Miller
After 10 dogless years, I am now the happy pet-parent of a Montana-mix puppy, a shorthaired bundle of energy named Taylor (nicknamed “the bug”) adopted from the Humane Society of Northwest Montana.

Since it had been some time since I trained a puppy (they guestimate Taylor to be 7-9 months old), I refreshed my skills by reading Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan, the purported “dog whisperer” all my dog-owner friends had raved about.  As soon as I got Taylor home, I began to put Millan’s methodology to work, establishing myself as the leader of her pack. 

I walked her extensively that first afternoon, using the short-leash technique Millan espouses to familiarize her with the boundaries of our property and the surrounding neighborhood.  After she was very tired, I brought her into the house and introduced her to my husband and her new home.  At night I put her in a training cage in the garage, so that my husband and I could sleep and wake on our own terms, not hers.  I have followed his prescription for regular exercise and discipline, followed by affection.  I’ll have to say, it worked.  She has bonded to us, is well behaved in most situations, and appears to be totally housebroken.  She’s also a great companion and a joy to experience.

It occurs to me that Cesar’s methodology extends to other avenues in life, not just the ones where you walk your dog.  Millan advocates the use of calm assertive energy to motivate your pet.  That kind of energy is motivating to the human species as well.  A calm attitude opens up the possibilities for positive, creative juices to flow.  Calm assertion involves being clear, direct, and efficient in communicating those ideas into actions.  So often in the PR world, we work under the pressure of high client expectations and tight deadlines.  Finding the calm assertive energy inside us is a good approach for achieving success in those circumstances.

How much is your digital data worth to you?

By Laine Branch

I was chatting away on my cell phone, engaged in gossip this past weekend, while transferring data from one flash disk to another.  When, suddenly, everyone within earshot heard me bemoan a careless mistake; I had deleted a file before it had completed copying safely over to my new flash disk. 

Panicked, I immediately contacted every tech geek I knew and asked if it were possible to recover deleted documents on a flash disk. I received the same frustrating response one after another; “I don’t think so.” At that moment, I realized how dependent we’ve become on our digital data, and how easily it could be lost. In my case, it took only one click of my finger.

Turns out, I’m not the only one making such careless mistakes. According to The Diffusion Group, human error is the second leading cause of digital data loss. And accidental deletions aren’t the only errors we make.  One morning you could be gazing at the news online, half-awake and sipping coffee, when whoops, you spill it over your laptop. How about those moments when you’re rushing to an important meeting with your laptop, clumsily lose your grip, and watch it crash to the floor? Or perhaps you’re at the airport, tired of lugging bags, put your laptop bag down for one second, look away, and it disappears.  Two thousand laptops are stolen daily.

Not only do we have to worry about being our own worst enemy, but also, as most of us know, technology has an uncanny knack of malfunctioning when you need it most.  Forty-four percent of data losses are due to hardware malfunctions. This is alarming considering our tendency to stuff our hard drives with thousands of pictures, music, and video, to the point where we wonder if there’s enough hard-drive space and memory – next thing you know, the computer crashes. 

Luckily for me, I do have one genius friend who was able to recover the deleted items on my flash disk. However, I promised to spare him from my future panic attacks. I went to Fry’s the next morning and purchased myself an IOMEGA USB 2.0 160GB drive. All my iTunes purchases (probably totaling close to a thousand dollars), recorded digital videos, movies, college papers, journals, Excel spreadsheets, and family photos are now backed up.

Working of the email grid

By Gail Farrell

Email’s handy for doing all sorts of things that you just can’t do by phone or that don’t really require an immediate in-person or by-phone response.  For example, you can transmit documents to others via attachments and use the calendar function for coordinating meetings and conference calls. 

Of course, email has it’s frustrations as well.  There are times when working off the email grid is the only way to go.  A dialogue of multiple email messages can consume far too much time; a phone call is far more effective for true dialog.  And when I need to interview people for a press release or an article, email just doesn’t hack it.  Sometimes the interviewees want the questions emailed to them, but their replies all too often require an additional phone conversation.  Believe me, it’s impossible to write a 1,500-word article when the answers to your 10 questions are two or three lines long.  Of course you can email a follow-up set of questions, but the answers still might not be what you’re looking for.

Interviewing people on the phone or in person, however, is a completely different experience.  When they’re speaking, people make much longer, more interesting, and more detailed replies—and it’s the details that really make a piece work.  You’re more likely to get good anecdotes or stories that someone might never think to write down.  You can ask follow-up questions or clarify something right away.  Just listening to someone’s tone of voice clues you in to what he or she finds interesting, boring, exciting or whatever and thus helps guide an interview.

Then there’s that whole personal relationship thing.  If you rely on email, do you really get to know the people with whom you’re communicating?  When you get off the email grid and actually talk to people, you get a feel for what they’re like. I recently had to interview several people in Powell, Wyoming, and while the conversations were mostly business, I wound up thinking that Powell must be home to the nicest, friendliest people in the U.S.  And getting to know people, even in a business context, is a heck of a lot more fun and interesting than sending emails back and forth.

Does College Prepare You for the Working World?

By JoAnna Wang

I graduated this past May and just started here at Engage PR.  I am slowly adjusting to working life, but from what I’ve experienced so far, it doesn’t take long before becoming acquainted with people, and your responsibilities seems natural and even second nature.  Maybe not the hours, though the 9-5 grind is typical of work life (I relish the fact that I never had a class in college that started before 11 and almost every semester I got at least a 3-day weekend). It’s still a little mind-boggling to consider myself as an alumna, but I am definitely relieved to have a college degree under my belt.  Now that I’m working, though, I find myself questioning what college has really done for me.  Does it prepare you for the working world? 

The most obvious answer to this question seems to be yes, it does, or why else would we pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for school books, tuition, and a college education?

Surprisingly however, most would agree that the majority of a typical college curriculum does not touch on many facets of working life.  Though I cannot deny learning about astronomy and philosophers like Descartes and Voltaire is somewhat interesting (key word being somewhat), the majority of courses are not relevant in the working world, especially in PR.  Often times, students realize they are interested in jobs outside their area of study and do not even pursue careers that are relevant to their majors.  On top of this, the variety of class schedules on a daily basis makes adjusting to the 9-to-5 work schedule even more difficult.  So how is college culture at all conducive to preparing for the working world?

I’ve found the most essential ways college has helped prepare me for working life come from things I’ve learned outside of the classroom.  Sure, college enhanced my ability to meet deadlines, write coherently, and work in teams through group projects.  But what college did the most was provide an environment in which I was able to learn how to master everyday responsibilities, such as getting groceries, being punctual, and paying the bills on my own.  It gave me a sense of independence that translates into my work environment, where I don’t need to be micromanaged to finish my task, and finish it well.  And to a certain degree, it makes the level of my work a higher quality because I am acquainted with the higher expectations associated with a college degree.  College was a necessary transition where I was able to grow up while still being a kid, and boy, don’t we all need that time to get some of those childish kinks out of our systems before we’re ready to commit to the working life. You live, you learn, you grow.

So if the question is, is college worth it?  The definite answer is YES.