Resetting the inclusion agenda: A conversation at Adweek NexTech

Recently I attended Adweek’s NexTech event for an important conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion in the world of tech.

It was a pleasure to discuss this with two women I greatly respect – Linda Boff, GE’s trailblazing CMO, and Adweek editor Lisa Granatstein. As we chatted, it was clear as women in the workplace, we all have a personal story to share. Progress has been made (a big shout out to all the men who joined us for our discussion!)… and there is still much work to do. That got me thinking – how do we define impact?

For me, I think of impact in three steps.

The first: Know your values. What do you stand for as a business?

I’m proud to say AT&T’s values are rooted in equality, with a history of taking a stand where other companies wouldn’t. We created a new career category at the turn of the 20th century with switchboard operators – jobs for women that paid better than most other jobs for women, like being a teacher. In 1975, we became one of the first major American corporations to adopt a policy prohibiting discrimination against employees based on sexual orientation. In 1981, we employed Shirley M. Jackson, the first African-American female physicist with a Ph.D., at Bell Labs.

The second step: Macro action. The programs your company puts in place.

At AT&T, we consciously distinguish between just championing a cause and actively working to solve it. It’s a commitment we live and breathe from the top, starting with our Chairman Randall Stephenson and our AT&T Communications CEO John Donovan and his leadership team, and cascading through our business.

We create space for our employees to have important cultural conversations – and learn from them. We have formal talent pipeline development programs in place, like our Women of Color Executive Leadership Program that supports the needs of leading women of color at AT&T to share the experiences unique to them in the workplace. More than 100,000 AT&T Communications employees participate in one of our Employee Resource Groups and Employee Networks.

We inspire action amongst our talent. At the height of tensions between police and communities of color across the country in 2017, our chairman challenged us at our Employee Resource Group conference to not just “tolerate” but to “understand” one another. Rachel Simon on our Finance team heard that call to action and decided to do something about it. She created DINE! – wThree steps to impact: Tackling the bias in the tech and advertising worlds. hich stands for Discover differences, Include one another, Navigate new perspectives, Eat! – and every month people like Rachel arrange a meal with a small group of coworkers from all parts of our business to talk about their backgrounds, how they see the world and the challenges they have overcome.

We create opportunities for the next generation, through things like AT&T’s support of Girls Who Code. At seven AT&T work locations across the country, summer immersion programs took place. Each week of the program covered projects related to computer science, including art, storytelling, robotics, video games, and websites and will give hundreds of girls access to new skills.

As marketers at AT&T, we’ve embraced the ANA’s #SeeHer commitment to improve the depiction of women and girls in advertising, and through #SeeHerInSports we’re leading the way to deliver more visibility and distribution of women’s sports. We invest in platforms for unheard voices from underrepresented groups, like AT&T Presents: Untold Stories that grants $1 million to an emerging filmmaker and Free The Work that looks to increase the number of underrepresented creators in bids for work across all aspects of content creation.

Finally, step three. Micro actions – the things you can do as an individual.

Small steps make a big difference. As a hiring manager, you can choose to review blind resumes and hire on achievements, rather than titles or tenue. As a leader, you can choose to mentor and pass it forward. As a project manager or decision maker, you can have a diversity of perspectives and experiences in the room and make sure their contributions are part of the dialogue.

These three steps – values, macro actions, micro actions – together can be a force for real change. What are you and your company doing to create the difference we need to see?