December 1, 2020 | Authored By
As a company — and as individuals — we’re watching every organization re-imagine how they do business remotely and reconsider their practices to better prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. Marketers in particular are well positioned to lead this radical transformation, because there’s no other industry that cuts across as many sectors, reaches as many people, or can change hearts and minds at such a massive scale.
That’s why NBCUniversal is standing at the front of the line working to build a brand new future of work. But what’s the best way to keep building that future? The answer is simple: together with our partners.
Earlier this year, we released a call-to-action for the entire industry to embrace radical transparency in the name of investing in our people, and to collaborate in building a better future for them — because when we do, they will build a better future for so many others. Our commitment to our people is also an investment in our customers. When we empower our teams with the information and insights they need to propose creative solutions we become more valuable partners.
That’s why we’re thrilled to open some of our resources to the industry to bring about large-scale transformation. It’s exactly why we invested to create our Center of Excellence (CoE) — a new world-class development program to help our teams remain on the frontlines of transformation. The CoE was created to build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce—and the most dynamic, agile, and mobile team—by investing in new state-of-the-art enterprise solutions that will democratize all resources while enhancing productivity and collaboration.
To help achieve our goal of developing the most mobile sales team in the industry, NBCUniversal’s CoE was built on four key pillars:
- Diversity & Inclusion: More inclusive trainings, new trainings to help all employees combats biases internally, new mentorship programs to help lifts up marginalized voices.
- Collaboration Tools: Expanding our Salesforce partnership to democratize resources from insights to product knowledge, as well as provide new options to help teams collaborate.
- Career Pathing & Development: More resources to identify strengths and opportunities, new self-assessments on growth and more leadership connection opportunities.
- Sales Excellence: New One Platform training curriculum, new knowledge dashboards, more proprietary productivity insights, new solutions-oriented trainings, and more.
Already, these efforts have shown results and sparked cultural change, with more than 80 percent of our sales teams utilizing our new shared resources for essential information and training. Plus, we’ll also begin opening up more programs for our partners starting with these two new initiatives:
- NBCUniversal’s Annual Innovation Day: What has become an iconic event will continue to evolve as we will now invite peers across the industry help co-create an inclusive, collaborative conference. We’ll partner with leaders from across the industry to debate pressing consumer and marketing issues, from content experience to data, streaming, measurement and more.
- BOLD@NBCUniversal is currently an internal group within Advertising and Partnerships that celebrates diversity and provides a platform and opportunities for talent across the division to connect and build community. Now we’ll open up some of BOLD’s most successful programming to our partners, starting the storytelling series Spotlight, virtual Speed Networking events with industry leaders, and access to BOLD’s public LinkedIn page.
We know this is the just the beginning. And we’re so excited to work together to meet this moment and chart a better future. NBCUniversal’s (virtual) door is always open — and we can’t wait for you to join us.
Read more in our public announcement here.