Best Operator for Women in Cable: Forerunner Accolade Recipient
Every company claims that its people are its greatest asset. Cox proves it, year after year. Strong and evolving pay equity and leadership programs ensure that every woman, regardless of position, has a chance to develop her full potential. Many companies do this for women at corporate headquarters, but Cox tailors leadership development programs for women in regional offices, call centers, and field technicians, too. These efforts have propelled the company to the Best Operators list for five consecutive years.
This year, Cox complemented its proven methods of recruiting women of color by adding a 12-month newcomer mentoring program for women of color at all levels. This program helps retain newcomers and find like-minded women across functional and division lines.
In its call centers, Cox has the most progressive practices for call center talent development, while also recognizing the importance of tying work/life practices to productivity. This strategy, paired with the thoughtful sick-child workstations that enable mothers to work with mildly ill children resting nearby, illustrates how work/life programs enhance efficiency and build business results. Cox also added stage-of-life benefits for retiring employees, and its rotation program is especially beneficial to mid-career women seeking to gain operations experience.
Best Companies for Women in Advancement Opportunities
Call centers are wide-open points of entry for women with diverse backgrounds and widely diverse skills, especially in cultural context and language. They are a rich lode of multicultural potential leaders that the cable industry needs to tap to reach growing ethnic populations.
The undisputed leader in leveraging call centers as talent development centers is Cox Communications. It continues to build on its success in identifying talented women in its call centers. Because call centers have high proportions of women of color, they can serve as open doors for recruiting diverse talent and channeling those women to corporate jobs. Cox sharpened its first-rung leadership identification and development programs, enabling call center managers to give promising women more responsibility earlier.
Cox also has turned a chronic management headache into a developmental advantage by viewing open positions and vacancies on key projects as a chance to rotate high-potential candidates into those slots temporarily. This practice enables midlife women, especially, to
immerse themselves in demanding projects or roles for a short stint and without relocating. Of the people who have so far rotated through this “internal assignment” program, about half were women.
Best Companies for Women in Resources for Work/Life Support
Cox has a history of tying work/life resources to productivity. It listens to employees to identify work/life conflicts and then constructs solutions geared to keeping employees on the job.
As the cable industry ages, it is starting to grapple with the needs of retirees for the first time on a large scale. Cox Communications has engineered a retirement transition program that enables employees to work part-time as they move into retirement. This allows employees to transition at their own pace and helps the company by providing a mentor to younger employees who are taking over the retiree’s position.
Continuing its leadership in call center work/life resources that build productivity, Cox rewards call center employees based on performance, with their first choice of shifts. The operator also provides sickchild workstations at its call centers to enable mothers with sick children to work with their children resting nearby. In addition, Cox extends to
call center employees other benefits popular at its headquarters.
Cox continues with its in-house childcare center in San Diego, which also provides back-up and emergency childcare.