The doom loop of PR productivity and profit

It is not news that clients are demanding more for less. Margins are squeezed. Teams are stretched. 

So we turn to the usual suspects: better project management systems, new productivity tools and software, streamlined processes. We optimise, we automate, we reconfigure and as the external pressure from clients mounts so does the pressure within our teams and our people seem increasingly disengaged.

For PR, where the emotional capital and energy of people is the difference between a campaign flying or failing that is a critical problem.

Perhaps we're looking in the wrong place entirely.

The UK has a well-documented productivity problem, and London - PR's heartland - is no exception. Recent analysis shows the capital's productivity has stagnated whilst other cities forge ahead. But this national narrative obscures a more uncomfortable truth for our sector: we're creating our own productivity crisis, chipping away at the foundations of profit.

Unlike manufacturing or even many other professional services, our success in PR depends almost entirely on the emotional and intellectual capital of our people. 

Creativity, persuasion, relationship-building, strategic thinking aren't processes that you can simply ‘Trello your way to perfection’.

They require psychological safety, mental bandwidth and emotional energy. Yet we're systematically depleting these very resources through an approach that's fundamentally counterproductive.

Doing more with less

The doom loop looks like this: Clients, themselves under pressure, demand greater ROI. Everyone is challenged to do more with less. Workloads intensify and the inevitable friction emerges. The everyday conflicts that take root when emotional capital is mined to exhaustion.

Here's where we make our critical mistake. We don't confront these emotionally draining conflicts; we expect people to ‘be professional’. To suck it up and protect the revenue. 

But unresolved workplace conflict doesn't disappear—it metastasises. According to Acas data, 44% of employees experience workplace conflict in any 12-month period. The most common impacts? Stress, anxiety, and depression. For an industry built on the cognitive and emotional labour of its people, this is catastrophic. 

The CIPR and PRCA joint study on mental health revealed 91% of PR professionals experienced poor mental health at some point in the past year, with 58% citing workload stress as a significant contributing factor.

Stress and anxiety narrow focus, reduce creativity, impair judgement, and erode collaboration. People who should be thinking strategically about client growth end up replaying that shitty email they just got over and over in their head. Your brilliant creative lead is now someone who's lost their spark and to use a movie term is “just phoning it in”.

If you think that clients can’t spot that change and start losing their confidence in the team, you are mistaken.

The irony is exquisite: in our pursuit of greater productivity, we're creating the precise conditions guaranteed to reduce it and risking profits in multiple ways.

A self-perpetuating circle

Yet when you search "PR productivity," you'll find endless content about systems, processes, tools, and software. What you won't find is mention of workplace conflict, the very thing that's actually draining your team's reserves and sending all sort of bad vibes to stressed out clients.

This oversight is particularly puzzling given the evidence of what works to solve this self-perpetuating circle. 

Workplace mediation to resolve conflict achieves success rates of 75-80% according to Acas and the Civil Mediation Council. It's a proven intervention that tackles disputes quickly and fairly, restores working relationships, and returns people's energy and attention to productive work. Yet fewer than 5% of workplace conflicts involve professional mediation.

Why the disconnect? Perhaps because asking an outside mediator feels like an admission of failure. Or because we believe conflicts should be managed internally by line managers who are already overstretched and are possibly causing the friction. Or simply because we've never considered it part of the productivity conversation.

But what if addressing workplace conflict was actually one of the highest-ROI decisions an agency could make? Consider the cost of unresolved conflict: reduced output and low-energy work, time lost to gossip and coalition-building, the attention diverted to internal wrangles rather than client development and ultimately, the cost of replacing talented people who've had enough. Then there’s the threat of a tribunal.

Now consider the alternative. Professional mediation creates a structured space for difficult conversations. It surfaces the real issues. It rebuilds relationships that have fractured. Most importantly, it restores people's capacity to do the work that shines and clients value.

This isn't about creating a utopia of group hugs and butterflies. It's about having an effective, reliable strategy to protect productivity and profit.

The traditional approach to improving profitability focuses on things you can plug and play: better systems, clearer processes, improved efficiency. But if people are operating at 80% because they're stressed, anxious and disengaged, all those operational improvements are building on a compromised foundation.

Perhaps the real productivity opportunity in PR isn't in the systems and tools we use, but in the speed with which we confront the conflicts that are inevitable. Perhaps sustainable profitability requires us to invest as much thought in maintaining the psychological infrastructure of our teams as we do in optimising our project management platforms.

Leaders aren't necessarily those with the most sophisticated tech stack or the most refined processes. They are the ones that recognise their people's emotional and intellectual capital as their primary asset, and protect it accordingly.

The question isn't whether workplace conflict exists in your agency it absolutely does. The question is whether you're going to continue treating it as a distraction or start recognising it as the profitability opportunity it actually is.

Nigel Sarbutts, founder of Structured Mediation.