Best Programmers for Women in Cable
It takes continual improvement and imagination to earn a spot on the Best Programmers list every year, as The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) have done. TWCC earned recognition in the first year of the PAR Initiative with its far-reaching and prescient pay equity policies. It has stayed on the list because of its evolving pay policies and practices and because of its nimble advancement and work/life culture, which responds quickly and thoughtfully to shifting business and employee needs.
Realizing that it could leverage its relatively small size and fanatical following for internal new business development, TWCC launched an internal track for converting new ideas into brandand profit-building ventures. Its new licensing operation, for instance, was a chance for two women employees to translate some viewers’ love of all things Weather into accessories with the logo.
More ideas are slated to emerge from The Weather Channel’s innovative “Leveraging difference” philosophy, which translates the insights from employees into marketable ideas for the demographics they represent. The programmer increased its numbers of women of color by improving the rewards that employees get for referring qualified friends to the company. It also now requires diverse candidate slates for all positions. These policies yielded results. In 2006, 30 percent of The Weather Channel’s new hires were minorities and 49.7 percent were women.
As in the past, The Weather Channel’s unsurpassed array of pay equity programs continued to evolve. Through its “Total Rewards” system, the programmer has improved pay transparency.
It also offers a holistic compensation program that starts before the point of hire and has checks and balances at every step to ensure equitable pay linked to performance.
Best Companies for Women in Pay Equity
The Weather Channel takes seriously its position on ensuring pay equity as the company has been seen as a pay equity innovator even before the PAR Initiative started. The Weather Channel seized the opportunity to become an industry leader and champion for pay
equity policies and management accountability for enacting them.
The Weather Channel has added transparency to the issue of pay equity. The programmer’s “Total Rewards” system gives each employee an annual statement summarizing base pay, merit and bonus pay, and salary ranges.
The Weather Channel also is among a handful of cable companies that counts pay equity enforcement as a core management competency. The programmer trains and coaches its managers in pay equity and diverse hiring. It augments those efforts by assigning human resource staffers to line managers to help them apply the company’s compensation policies equitably. Managers that discover pay inequities can use The Weather Channel’s “equity pot” of money to correct pay differences. One result of its close attention to pay equity
is that the company finds that it taps the equity pot less and less, evidence that its consistent evolution of fair pay practices is embedded in its culture.