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Media Contact: Melissa Hicks at 484.888.6766

C2HR Honors Four Companies and 

Two Aspiring Leaders with HR Awards

NAPERVILLE, ILL., August 3, 2022 – As industry employers continue their efforts to transform the employee experience and pave the way for the future of work, human resources (HR) professionals are innovating amid a sea of ongoing change. The C2HR Excellence in HR Awards provide a forum to recognize trailblazers among the content and connectivity HR community. The 2022 awards include three categories: Employee Engagement, Workplace Wellness and Aspiring HR Leaders.

“C2HR celebrates the HR professionals and teams who have elevated their companies’ commitment to people, purpose and performance. We congratulate each of the 2022 HR award recipients for their outstanding achievements,” said Parthavi Das, executive director of C2HR.   EMPLOYEE

ENGAGEMENT AWARD

ESPN Career Center is the recipient of the 2022 Employee Engagement Award for creating a Culture of Career that fosters limitless possibilities for employees to keep their career game flowing 365 days a year. With career development as a priority, the ESPN team developed the idea of modeling their efforts after the career counseling provided by many universities. The result is a brand-new, one-of-a-kind career metaverse that personalizes the career stages of ESPN’ers in a sports-themed world in an immersive experience. The ESPN Career Center has earned 14,000+ page views, created real-time meta-data of employee engagement across their career content resources to inform their strategy, and attracted more than 500 employees to engage in the ESPN All-Star Talent Showcase Competition to celebrate their best-in-class work. ESPN is setting the bar for elevating the employee experience at the heart of their employees’ career journey.

 WORKPLACE WELLNESS AWARDS

Three companies received the Workplace Wellness Award: Mediacom Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery and WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone. Each company focused on a different element of wellbeing.

Using a series of videos featuring leaders and employees, live webinars for employees and their families, and the resumption of the company’s healthy living initiatives including its popular company-wide walking campaigns, Mediacom Communications worked to encourage a healthy  lifestyle, pandemic safety measures and stress management. In addition, the company introduced a bevy of new wellness programs including the expansion of its telemedicine benefit and the elimination of all co-payments associated with it; new voluntary benefits for supplemental financial protection for employees and their family members; enhanced communication for its 2nd Opinion Doctor program, and the rollout of a prescription price transparency program and Specialty Rx program.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) wellness innovation, the Global Wellbeing Festival, was created with the purpose of encouraging employees to take time to really focus on their wellbeing. Live content was customized and scheduled for each region around the world. Employees and their families were invited to join sessions from around the world, such as yoga in Italian or a cooking class in Spanish. Over 3,000 employees participated in the two-day multi-event festival, and several of the programs that were launched during the festival are now part of WBD’s permanent wellbeing offerings. With the recent merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery – two companies with a strong tradition of supporting employees and their families – there is significant expanded opportunity to draw on the experience of both legacy organizations and their rich content to develop new and creative programming.

By taking a holistic approach to employee wellbeing and providing a rich hub of resources through the company’s intranet “The Gig,” WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone has improved employee wellness scores as measured by Officevibe. The company charted improvements in overall employee wellness, overall employee personal health, and reported stress levels.  WOW!’s reported metrics are based on 70% participation of more than 1,400 company employees. WOW! is dedicated to fostering an excellent work environment and company culture where employees are empowered and feel that they have strong support networks and opportunities to excel.

ASPIRING HR LEADERS

The 10^th anniversary of the Aspiring HR Leader Award resulted in honoring two up and comers. Laura Fields, senior director of talent acquisition for Charter Communications, Inc. was selected based on her passion for and impact on candidate selection and assessment. In four short years, Fields successfully transformed Charter’s approach to hiring. Her initiatives include the launch of a mobile optimized pre-employment assessment, implementing the Asana Project Management tool, migrating all talent acquisition dashboards from Excel to a Visier Recruiting Module, and optimizing the Video Interview Relationship and Spectrum Fit Finder with Modern Hire. The work that Fields and her team performs supports all of the hiring at Charter, a leading broadband connectivity company and cable operator with more than 93,000 employees that operates under the Spectrum brand.

 The second Aspiring HR Leader is Christine Simmons, director of learning and development for WOW! Internet, Cable and Phone, whose personal motto is: If we all did what we’re truly capable of, we’d be astounded! Simmons has expanded the delivery, accessibility and stakeholder collaboration for learning opportunities. In 2021, she launched optional virtual weekly workshops that have been utilized by over 1,400 employees to raise their WOW!-specific business acumen, broaden their understanding of the customer journey, and understand how departments intersect and complete work handoffs. Recognizing that sometimes learning needs to come in the moment, Simmons applies an anytime, anywhere approach to learning delivered through online internal learning portals focused on key functional areas. She and her team also launched eight WOW! Training Academies as well as the leadership development program (LDP), Leadership Reimagined.

Each of the award recipients will be celebrated during the virtual

C2HR CON on August 9-11, and in-depth articles on their

achievements will be featured in upcoming issues of HR Pulse, the C2HR member newsletter. C2HR thanks its award partner, Cablefax, for its ongoing support of the industry’s HR community.  

 ABOUT C2HR

Content & Connectivity Human Resources (C2HR) is a professional association serving 4,800 members from 50 companies spanning the telecommunications, technology, media and entertainment sectors. C2HR provides industry-specific analytics, information and resources, as well as networking and educational opportunities. Its groundbreaking initiatives include the Annual C2HR Compensation Surveys and C2HR CON. For more information, visit www.C2HR.org.