Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on July 12, 2012 at 12:13 pm
By Debbie Storey, AT&T Chief Diversity Officer
What a great day! I always appreciate the chance to talk about how AT&T sets the bar on leveraging diversity to drive innovation and growth, and today’s roundtable, Diversity Is Good for the Bottom Line, hosted by the Center for American Progress, was an ideal platform for sharing our story.
One of our goals at AT&T is to move the diversity discussion among business leaders and policymakers beyond traditional definitions. Do race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation matter? You bet they do. That’s why AT&T’s been a leader in all of these areas for decades. We’re recognized year in and year out by organizations like DiversityInc, the Human Rights Campaign, Black Enterprise Magazine and LatinaStyle because we’re the gold standard at ensuring diversity in all our business practices. Getting to 39 percent women employees and 39 percent people of color doesn’t happen by accident. And it’s not by chance that people of color hold almost a third of management jobs at AT&T, compared with a national average of 22 percent.
Beyond that, however, we’ve come to understand that the real value of diversity – as it relates to a company’s workforce – comes from leveraging the unique attributes every employee brings to the workplace. At AT&T, that means valuing people with different educational backgrounds, learning styles, cultural norms, generational views and more. When we create an inclusive environment, where every view is welcomed and embraced, we achieve an unprecedented level of innovation and creativity.
