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.
Read More 
Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on March 19, 2012 at 10:10 am
By Charlene Lake, AT&T Senior Vice President of Public Affairs and Chief Sustainability Officer
American consumers are in the midst of a communications revolution, and AT&T is proud to be playing a role in it. Powerful devices and services keep consumers connected around the clock and increase the velocity of commerce in this country.
The very viability of our nation’s communications structure and, indeed, the viability of our business at AT&T depend on communities of customers and employees who have the ability to make the best use of the tools we have to offer. After all, it takes people to power the technology that unleashes great change in this country.
That’s why we place such an emphasis on supporting education. AT&T’s Aspire initiative seeks a nation where every student graduates high school ready for a successful college career, or ready to feed the talent pipeline to American business and become productive members of society.
It’s been an inspiration to watch how our original $100 million Aspire program has impacted more than 1 million students across the nation in the past four years. This was done by working with more than 1,000 excellent community and national organizations who like us, understand how important it is to improve graduation rates.
A big part of our impact came through our employees, who worked with Junior Achievement to expose 100,000 students to the real-life world of business through Job Shadow. All across the company our employees opened the eyes of students to the possibilities of their future. Some students rode elevators for the first time. Some who had never been far from their neighborhood got to experience live Telepresence video conferencing connections with students all across the country, and some who believed they were limited in career options realized they could be writers, or engineers or CEOs. And all got to see and hear how their classroom education had real relevance and impact to their future life success. Our employees made a difference in the lives of thousands of students all across the country.
Read More
