Wellbeing Support for Public Relations Teams

A wellbeing strategy that looks robust in a board pack can feel strangely absent at 11pm on a Sunday when a crisis breaks.

In UK public relations teams, that gap is now quantified. Ninety‑one per cent of professionals report poor mental health in the last 12 months. Average wellbeing scores on the Warwick‑Edinburgh scale have slipped, with juniors scoring just 39.9. Two in five feel daily pressure or anxiety from work. Yet 64% say their employer takes mental health seriously and 65% believe they would be supported if they were struggling.

On paper, this is progress. In lived experience, it is not.

The complication is that HR has often translated PR’s wellbeing crisis into a branding and benefits problem. More campaigns, more signposting, more assets. Meanwhile, the structural drivers in PR – overwhelming workload, “always‑on” expectations and fragile psychological safety – remain largely untouched.

This distinction matters.

When a wellbeing strategy collides with PR reality

Look closely at the pattern and the contradiction becomes hard to ignore. Access to support in PR has expanded: almost half of professionals can reach a mental health first aider; a third have access to counselling; most can work flexibly or remotely. Those who use options like flexible hours or remote work report higher wellbeing and, in many cases, explicit improvement. Eighty‑seven per cent of flexible‑working users say it improves their mental health.

And yet diagnosed mental health conditions have risen from one in four to one in three. Reports of poor mental health have climbed from 51% to 60%. This is not a marginal issue at the edges of performance; it is the water PR teams are swimming in.

The first structural driver is load. Fifty‑eight per cent of PR professionals cite “overwhelming workload” as their main source of stress; 59% say this leads them to postpone annual leave. In agencies, 75% report high stress, most commonly at 8 out of 10. This is the mechanism by which wellbeing support quietly fails: people cannot use what they cannot make time for.

The second driver is the “always‑on” mentality. Pre‑pandemic, 70% of PR professionals worked from the office; now only 9% do. Hybrid and remote models have blurred lines between “on‑call for clients” and “on‑call for everyone, all the time”. Sector commentary describes a constant barrage of updates that hinders focus and intensifies vigilance. In an environment built on crisis‑readiness and real‑time media cycles, being reachable becomes a proxy for being committed.

The third, more subtle, driver is cultural normalisation. Stress is still treated as a badge of seriousness in parts of the industry. Commentators warn against accepting this as inherent to PR, yet the narrative of “it’s just how this job is” remains powerful. Junior staff, already with the lowest wellbeing scores, absorb these norms fastest.

Against that backdrop, adding more initiatives – however well‑intentioned – looks like asking people to fix systemic overload in their spare time. Behavioural science tells us that when actions require high effort in a depleted state, uptake will be low, even when motivation is high. PR is a textbook case.

This is where HR design, not messaging, becomes decisive.

Why support sits unused – and what HR must change first

The underuse of wellbeing support in PR is often misread as apathy. The numbers tell a different story. Forty‑seven per cent of professionals have access to a mental health first aider; only 7% have ever spoken to one. Thirty‑one per cent can access a counsellor; just 16% do. Exercise classes, mentoring schemes, information campaigns: all show the same pattern of modest take‑up despite clear evidence that users report better wellbeing.

In parallel, demand for certain options is explicit. Fifty‑eight per cent say they would like duvet or mental health days, yet only 2% currently have them. A third want access to a counsellor; a similar proportion want regular wellbeing monitoring via staff surveys, but only 15% report this is available.

So PR professionals are not indifferent. They are making rational choices under constraint.

Overwhelming workload is the first constraint. When 59% are delaying annual leave because of volume, booking a counselling session during working hours can feel irresponsible. A digital mental fitness platform such as Leafyard works precisely because it recognises this reality: microlearning and five‑day experiments can be completed in under 20 minutes, at any point in the day, without navigating calendars or explaining absences. Behavioural‑science‑based habit formation and structured journalling help busy professionals build coping routines in the small gaps they actually have, not the idealised ones policy assumes.

The second constraint is perceived risk. While openness about mental health has improved – 49% now feel able to talk to colleagues – 35% still would not feel comfortable discussing difficulties at work. Among those who do disclose, most experience support, but a notable minority say colleagues do not take it seriously enough. In a client‑service culture, that ambiguity can be enough to keep people silent.

Here, leadership behaviour is the real intervention. Communication professionals working for empathic leaders report higher organisational commitment, better mental health and lower turnover intentions. That is not a soft benefit; it is a performance variable. Equipping managers with practical tools – for example, embedding mental health first responder training and guided video coaching into their development, and backing it with same‑day access to NCPS‑accredited counsellors via 24/7 live chat or phone – signals that psychological safety is operational, not rhetorical. New‑generation EAPs such as Leafyard make this kind of always‑on, multi‑channel support available without adding administrative friction for HR.

The third constraint is noise. HR leaders themselves acknowledge that over half of their benefits are underused. In PR, another campaign about campaigns will not cut through. What does cut through is specificity and proof. Behavioural analytics and board‑ready reporting that show, in pounds and pence, how improved sleep, focus and reduced absence translate to ROI give HR leverage to renegotiate workloads and availability expectations with the business, not just wellbeing budgets. Leafyard’s case studies demonstrate how framing mental fitness as a productivity asset rather than a discretionary perk changes the quality of those conversations.

What’s working offers a route forward. Where flexible and remote working are used, wellbeing scores are higher. Where empathic leadership is present, mental health and retention are better. Where support is accessible at any time, on any device, anonymously and without booking hurdles, engagement rises well above the sub‑5% typical of traditional, hotline‑led EAPs. Leafyard’s approach – combining self‑directed digital journeys with rapid escalation to human support – exemplifies this shift from reactive crisis lines to proactive mental fitness.

For HR leaders overseeing PR and communications, the sequence now matters more than the size of the benefits catalogue.

Start with workload: define what “overwhelming” looks like in your context, protect recovery time as fiercely as utilisation, and test rota‑based crisis cover rather than defaulting to team‑wide vigilance. Reset availability norms: make “okay to log off at a reasonable hour” a measurable expectation for managers, not a slogan. Then, align support with how PR actually operates: short, evidence‑based, behaviour‑change‑focused digital journeys that build mental fitness over months, backed by instant human help when things tip into crisis, and analytics that let you challenge unsustainable patterns with data, not anecdotes.

When wellbeing in PR stops being a communications task and becomes a design problem, support stops sitting on the shelf. And when mental fitness is treated as a core capability of high‑stakes communications work, cultures can shift faster than most leaders expect.