President Biden is making life different for PR pros, and on the latest “PR’s Top Pros Talk” video interview, Edelman U.S. chief operating officer Lisa Osborne Ross talks with Doug Simon about some of the steps communicators should take to ensure success in the changed environment.

“The way he communicates and the way he expects his cabinet and those close to him to communicate has really determined how all of us now have to communicate with them,” Ross says. “The president is clear, he is direct, he is probably honest to a fault... It's a different type of communication.”

For a look at what businesses are expecting in the months ahead, Ross refers to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer. One major trend is an agreement by many business leaders that “employees are the most valuable asset that any business has.”

The increasing power of employees, she says, is making itself felt in decisions about if, when and how they will come back to the office after such a long stretch of working at home. “Something like 69 percent said they will determine how they go back,” Ross tells Simon.

Edelman’s research also shows that employees are placing more trust in the people they work for. “When my employer, when my CEO gives me information about the vaccine, about social unrest, about racial equity, about pay, about immigration, I trust the information I get from my employer more than I trust information I get from anyone else,” she says.

Interestingly, trust in employers extends across the partisan divide. “This was the only place we saw alignment between Trump voters and Biden voters, and that was that they both trusted their employer.”

But one point of alignment, she tells Simon, may well lead to others. “In this hyper partisan world that we live in, if we can find alignment on two or three things, we might be able to find alignment on 20 or 30. And I think that leads to a much better outcome.”

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, Ross also gives her view on how women, as well as members of other underrepresented groups, can become leaders.

While it’s important to be “really, really good,” she says, it’s also essential to “bring your full self to work… To give the best, you have to give 100 percent, and then be yourself. Because being someone else is a second full time job, and it takes away from your first.”

View all of the interviews in the “PR's Top Pros Talk” series. Subscribe to get notified when new episodes are available.

Interested in taking part? Contact Doug Simon at [email protected]

D S Simon Media helps clients get their stories on television through satellite media tours and by producing and distributing content to the media. The company also produces live social media events.