In an industry particularly impacted by long hours, heightened stress levels, rigid expectations, and an ever-quickening pace that often leads to burnout, PR professionals are calling for change now more than ever.
R Public Relations is one firm answering this critical call to break the mold and lend employees happier and healthier professional and personal lives.
Longtime publicist and founder of R Public Relations (RPR), Emily Reynolds Bergh, is one such individual who has spent more than 15 years as a publicist and endured various toxic agency environments. Armed with the dream to create something more, these experiences ultimately led her to establish her firm and later discover that she had unintentionally created an unhealthy workplace of her own.
After reevaluating her leadership style, Bergh made the pivotal decision to redefine how she led, restructure where she spent her energy, and—perhaps most importantly—reimagine how the entire agency model could function.
With an unwavering dedication to this people-first approach, she got to work refining her organization.
By focusing on work-life balance, a ‘circular’ management style, empowerment, and innovative leadership, Bergh transformed RPR from a profitable company to a successful business, respected team, and empowering client advocate, proving how PR is done and how the industry functions can be transformed.
Rethink
When valued team members turned in their notice and left their positions at RPR, it triggered a leadership ‘wake-up call’ and intense self-reflection for Bergh. She realized that actual growth for herself, her team, and her business meant shifting her priority from control to connection.
Because of this key shift, RPR now centers on intentional leadership. This type of management leverages self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the courage to admit mistakes and establishes authenticity as the business’s cultural foundation. When employees develop trust, stability, and a sense of safety in their workplace, an organization’s internal culture can thrive.
This shift toward prioritizing wellness also led to a departure from the model most agencies operate under: a well-defined top-down hierarchy. During her deconstruction era, Bergh dismantled this structure within RPR and introduced a nonlinear, non-hierarchical, and circular management model that prioritizes collaboration, innovation, and ownership.
At RPR, circular management allows all team members to contribute creative ideas, make decisions with transparency and shared ownership, and lead in their own domains rather than being micromanaged.
Letting go of traditional control has allowed Bergh’s team to fill the gaps with creative, bold, and strategic thinking from diverse perspectives. This thoughtful transition resulted in higher morale and a team culture where people feel seen, heard, and valued, making the firm even more agile and strategically minded.
Retain
For an industry that protects and prioritizes the personal and professional lives, well-being, and perception of humans, it is quite radical for a PR agency to prioritize work-life balance and a truly people-first culture.
The 24-hour news cycle is real, and while hustle culture, timeliness, and status dominate the PR industry, Bergh has made work-life balance a core value at RPR.
While this buzzword looks pretty on paper and can help attract prospective candidates, it can be challenging to stand firm when push comes to shove, easily backsliding into long hours and overflowing to-do lists. This is why RPR emphasizes ‘walking the walk’—offering flexible scheduling and remote work to support individual lifestyles, mental health accommodations, and regular check-ins that prioritize team members’ well-being while refusing to glorify burnout.
After all, productivity isn’t measured solely by hours but by impact.
Valuing people above all else, Bergh and her leadership team also put ample time and effort into thoughtful culture-enhancing initiatives such as an open-door workload policy, a dedicated HR consultant-led survey system, professional development opportunities, bonus plans, and team-building activities.
Though it encourages flexible hours and work formats, RPR also values periodically planned in-person retreats, as they build trust, foster connection, and inspire creativity while respecting team members’ needs.
Ultimately, these intentional shifts result in an impressive retention rate, a healthy culture centered on loyalty and camaraderie, and a team that is proud of its work and workplace.
Final Thoughts
While in theory it’s easy to separate a company’s success from its people, in practice, it’s impossible. Success isn’t just measured by client wins. It’s also calculated by redefining what a modern, healthy, human-centric agency can be, evolving individual firms and the industry as a whole from reactive and traditional to purposeful and transformative.
In a world where toxic leadership once felt inevitable, Emily Reynolds Bergh and RPR are proof that the future of PR agency life can thrive when built on a foundation of empathy, trust, and a shared sense of purpose.
Salim Ismail, author of “Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper than Yours“, said it best: “Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is; your fate is to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. There is no middle ground.”