A Letter from the Institute for Public Relations Team
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Dear Research Letter Subscribers,
Due to the pausing of the bi-weekly IPR Research Letter last week out of respect to the anti-racism protests, the IPR Research Letter is longer than usual.
While we are expanding the Research Letter to include other relevant topics, we will continue to publish twice a week.
Thank you!
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Institute for Public Relations and The Harris Poll Release New Report on How Employee Expectations Are Changing Due to COVID-19
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The Institute for Public Relations and The Harris Poll surveyed 831 U.S. adults employed full time, from May 15 to May 17, to find out how they feel about returning to work and what safeguards they would like employers to put into place. Non-essential employees want safety assurances and to return to the office only when COVID-19 is no longer a threat and most of them want staggered returns.
Six Key Findings:
1.
Most employees want to phase out the open office concept to ensure social distancing.
80% of respondents said there should be sectioned-off offices and a phase-out of open-space offices.
2.
Overwhelmingly, employees don’t think employers should require employees to return to the office if work can be done remotely until COVID-19 is no longer a threat.
83% of respondents agreed that if work is able to be done remotely, employers should not require employees to return to the office until COVID-19 is no longer a threat.
3.
Most employees think they should be able to work from home until they are comfortable to return.
81% of respondents said employees should be allowed to work from home during the pandemic until they feel comfortable to return.
4.
Three-quarters of employees expect workplaces to supply certain protections when they re-open.
74% of respondents say workplaces must have a supply of hand sanitizer in order to re-open.
5.
Employees expect their employer to provide certain benefits if they contract COVID-19 at work.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they should be entitled to paid sick leave (72%) while two-thirds (67%) said they should receive payment for COVID-19 testing.
6.
Americans are more likely to support legal protection if companies demonstrate accountability for employee safety.
The top three that would create more support include companies demonstrating how they are taking accountability for public safety (56%), transparent messaging outlining legal requirements (48%), and honest and open communication about blind spots and improvement areas (47%).
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Protests: What Americans Say Companies Should Do
Morning Consult
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Morning Consult fielded a study between May 31-June 1, 2020 among a national sample of 1,990 adults examining what Americans think companies should do in response to the current protests occurring in the United States, what they should emphasize in their messaging, and more.
This poll provides an early look at the data analysis from this nationally represented sample.
Some key findings include:
- 47% said the CEO is the most appropriate person to deliver messages on the protests and demonstrations, while only 17% said it was appropriate for a company's customer to speak on the issue.
- 49% of respondents said companies should emphasize the death of George Floyd in their response to the protests and demonstrations in occurring in U.S. cities.
- No one has received positive reviews in how they are addressing the protests.
- 43% feel Donald Trump is doing a "poor" job while only 11% feel he is "excellent" in addressing the protests.
- 24% feel Joe Biden is doing a "poor" job while only 11% feel he is "excellent" in addressing the protests.
- 11% of respondents reported feeling that the media, police, governors, and mayors are doing "excellent" in addressing the protests. 25% of respondents feel the media and police are doing "poor" and 16% feel governors and mayors are doing "poor."
- More than half of respondents said the worst of the protests lie ahead.
Read more to learn about how Americans think companies should respond and react to the protests.
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Student Resistance Movements in Higher Education: An Analysis of the Depiction of Black Lives Matter Student Protests in News Media
Meseret F. Hailu Ph.D., Arizona State University; and Molly Sarubbi, Ph.D., Education Commission of the States
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This abstract is summarized by IPR from the
original journal article
published in
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. If you cannot access the study, please request a full PDF copy from Dr. Meseret Hailu at meseret.hailu@asu.edu.
Dr. Meseret Hailu
and Dr. Molly Sarubbi conducted a media content analysis of newspaper coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement using the
Chronicle of Higher Education to analyze the need for institutional leadership to understand both the impact of popular media and to recognize students' representation on college campuses.
Authors used a semiotic analysis as they qualitatively coded articles from 2017 in the
Chronicle of Higher Education that focused on Black Lives Matter movements occurring on college campuses in the United States.
The authors found:
"Organizational leadership can be influenced and disrupted to promote racial justice... and in situations where institutional policies perpetuate racial inequity, Black Lives Matter student movements have the capacity to complicate existing discourse about Blackness in higher education and catalyze substantial social change."
Read more to learn about the impact that popular media have within student-led movements.
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What Trump’s New Executive Order on Social Media Means for PR Practitioners
Cayce Myers, Ph.D., LL.M., J.D., APR, Virginia Tech, Chief Legal Editor for IPR
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On May 29, 2020 President Donald Trump tweeted “Revoke 230!” to his over 80 million Twitter followers. Rather than focusing on a general political message, this tweet speaks directly to a section of the Communications Decency Act, specifically Title 47 United States Code section 230(c).
How could a U.S. Code subsection passed in 1996 become a political rallying cry in the presidential election of 2020? After all, until a few weeks ago section 230 of the CDA was relatively unknown outside the circles of policy experts, media lawyers, and communication law professors. The answer lies in the political matrix of fake news, social media removal policies, Twitter tags, and a growing criticism on the right of censorship of conservative messaging.
Cayce Myers, Ph.D., explains what Section 230 is, why it has become controversial, what Trump’s executive order says about social media, and discussed how this affects public relations practitioners.
Some key insights include:
- There is a heightened criticism of social media privacy policies and the use of personal data. There is a real concern about the insidious nature of fake news and conspiracy theory websites that promote disinformation.
- There is also an increased acknowledgement across the political spectrum that social media is a space where a lot of society’s discussions are taking place.
- We may see a shift of platforms starting to have political connotations (whether they like it or not).
- Having a social media company provide unsolicited editorial comments on content presents a host of problems including alienating users, creating questions of the validity and biases of the fact checker, and perhaps introducing a level of apprehension among users who fear that their post may be fact checked by an unknown site coordinator.
- Conversely, the lack of controls on content online have given rise to the problems associated with fake news and conspiracy theories that have detrimental impact on American discourse and society at multiple spheres (even spheres outside politics).
Read more to learn about Section 230 and what it means for the public relations practice in the future.
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Returning to Work in the Future of Work: Embracing Purpose, Potential, Perspective, and Possibility During COVID-19
Erica Volini, Jeff Schwartz, Brad Denny, David Mallon, Yves Van Durme, Maren Hauptmann, Ramona Yan, Shannon Poynton, Deloitte Insights
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As the COVID-19 pandemic drives profound societal and organizational shifts, leaders have the opportunity to return to work by designing the future of work, building on the lessons and practices their organizations executed during the crisis.
In this year’s
Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report, researchers reexamine whether humanity and technology were truly in conflict and to consider how it is possible to resolve the seeming paradox of finding ways to remain distinctly human in a technology-driven world.
In each chapter, they show how organizations that embrace a new set of attributes anchored in purpose, potential, and perspective can create lasting value for themselves, their workforce, and society at large.
Some new work possibilities that emerged from this study include:
- Designing work for well-being: Living and performing at your best. As companies stage the return to work, organizations need to go further than just fostering open dialogue and open practices around well-being. Now is the time to embed well-being into every aspect of the design and delivery of work itself and to fundamentally redesign work toward outputs instead of activities.
- The post-generational workforce: From millennials to perennials. Use a data-driven approach to better understand workers’ unique attributes, needs, and dimensions and segment their workforce accordingly. If organizations can better understand their workers, they will be able to more effectively develop targeted programs and policies that bring out workers’ personal best while affording them the heath protections they need to safely do their work.
- Knowledge management: Creating context for a connected world. As they stage the return to work, organizations have the opportunity to leverage the power of AI to build a culture of actionable knowledge-sharing and knowledge creation that strengthens organizational connectivity and affords the organization resilience to be able to withstand, and even to thrive in, environments of disruption, uncertainty, and change.
- Ethics and the future of work: From “could we” to “how should we." Organizations need to ask themselves critical questions to help them prepare for the perceived and actual ethical impacts of business decisions. They should also be monitoring government response, as this too will continue to evolve coming out of the crisis.
Read more to learn about the shifts COVID-19 has created and how organizations can best utilize these changes to enhance the employee and client experience.
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How Does Stress Affect the Social Amplification of Risk?
Nathalie F. Popovic, Ulrike U. Bentele, Jens C. Pruessner, et al, University of Konstanz, Germany
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Dr. Nathalie Popovic and researchers at the University of Konstanz conducted an experiment to see how stress influences risk perception and the communicating about that risk to others (i.e., the social amplification of risk).
In an experiment, 146 participants were exposed to either an acute stressor situation (i.e., symptoms develop quickly but do not last) or assigned to the control group. Next, they were given information with a “concerning” message and real-world articles about the banned antibacterial agent Triclosan.
While most participants initially reported before the start of the experiment they were not very concerned about Triclosan, they were increasingly concerned after reading the articles. Next, they were asked to write a message to another person about Triclosan. However, the degree of that concern was mediated by increases in the stress hormone cortisol. Specifically, while stress can amplify risk perception, communication about that risk becomes less alarming when stressed, reducing social amplification of the risk.
The authors concluded:
“The stronger the increase in cortisol, the smaller the increase in concern. In line with this finding, participants who were acutely stressed passed on information with a less negative signal about Triclosan than participants who were not acutely stressed, even though this effect was not mediated by increases in cortisol. These findings suggest that acute stress causing an increase in cortisol renders people to be less responsive to negative risk information.”
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